To the point of collapse, and beyond

“When burnout and chronic fatigue were ‘discovered’ in the 1980s, the popular was – and still is, for the most part – incredulity and a sense that people whose bodies had suddenly and seemingly inexplicably forgotten how to be well were somehow faking it. Or asking for it.”

Great post Maria. The above line particularly speaks to me. It seems like you cannot take a day off without being accused of malingering.

Burnout-level work is a kind of theatrical performance expected in certain professional cultures. It seems to serve as an effective justification for excessive compensation in modern society, despite the obvious diminishing returns associated with sleep deprivation.

It is ironic that the logic of F.W. Taylor’s pioneering scientific management studies documenting the substantial productivity benefits of forced rest breaks has never been accepted by knowledge workers. The burnout work style is the modern white collar workplace equivalent of ritual warfare among primitive peoples. It is a symbolic display of ferocious commitment with dubious practical benefits.

… and they are actually proud of it – they aren’t pretending.

It’s the proles in the race to the bottom (stoked by adverts for lynctus, God rot ’em). Self-abasing mentalities impose externalities – maybe unions? Oh no, we ain’t got ’em.

In Lords of Finance , Benjamin Strong the president of the NY Fed was shown to be chronically ill , a man who routinely took long stretches of time away to convalesce. Montagu Norman the governor of the Bank of England took months off as well to vacation in France ( to rest his nerves) or travel across the Atlantic to the US. It was shocking how often they were away from their respective institutions. However rest time didn’t help them make the right decisions to avoid the Great Depression. In my personal experience , long hours in the office are preferable to the midnight shift.

Nietzsche seems to get close to the heart of this stuff with his writings on sickness and convalescence. It’s what came to mind while reading Maria’s post, fwiw.

Perhaps I’m overdramatizing but suicides have increased dramatically for the middle-aged. You wonder if some people might reconsider if (a) they had a safety net and (b) they could take a rest.

It’s not at all true that burnout and giving up and taking to your bed are only for the upper classes. In fact, you find some people doing that even in very poor countries.

Charles Ives was burned out by the time he was fifty, no longer able to continue in either his insurance business or his composing.

Fifty’s not so bad; by the time they reached that age, Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn were long dead.

Two thoughts:

1. I have just a fairly ordinary office job, but both my father and father-in-law are surprised by the amount of vacation time I have. My dad in particular, recalls that it was many years into his career (big company, white collar job with a graduate degree) before he got his first week of paid vacation. A generation later, my fist job started me with 4 weeks. That makes me think that while we like to complain about how we are all more overworked and more stressed than people used to be, maybe that’s not the case.

2. For the headline people — JP Morgan, Winston Churchill, etc. — I wonder whether there has been a change due to rising population. There are roughly 4x as many people in the world today as when JP was active, and a much higher percentage of them matter — in the sense of being part of global news and society — but there still can only be one head of the Fed, a handful of top level global investment banking heads, etc. So there is a lot more competition for those jobs. Another (fuzzy) way of saying the same thing is that the reach of our institutions has gotten larger over time in such a way that the ratio of “top-level jobs” to “globally involved population” has fallen over time, though in the process absorbing some of the unused attention space that had existed previously.

And as a recent article by Jim can’tspellhisname economist in the New Yorker showed, all this bravado is inversely related to productivity. In management it seems closely linked to pure performance, as both the tough boss and the tough employee engage in an odd minuet to determine not who can do more or better work, but who will survive. And yes much of it is about sleep: plenty of data on average hours of sleep and illness. Less than six will kill you. Or, if the person not sleeping is an intern or resident, will kill me.

That was a truly great post!

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

You know all these years later that still sounds like a good foundation for living a happy, varied life.

17: Work hours were reduced and vacation time increased during much of the 20th century but the tendency is now in the opposite direction (certainly for those having to work multiple jobs) or stagnating at best. It is unlikely that those entering the workforce today get more vacation time than their parents. Correct me if I’m wrong.

@Ben Alpers

Well what a certain Victorian gentleman wrote and what came of his writings were two very different things. The dictatorship of the proletariat turned out in the end to not look a whole lot different than the dictatorship of the plutocrat.

Of COURSE everyone would like leisure time. Whether we get to enjoy it or not is very much a class-based thing. (and political/social, in the case of Europe vs. the US)

@dBonar : Yes many companies offer (comparatively) substantial amounts of vacation time…on paper.

What’s not down on paper is the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) business culture that enforces taking the most minimal time off whatever, and when you’re gone, check in by email, and “by the way, your TPS reports are still due while you’re away.” all hanging with the threat that you are expendable, and oh yes, you DO know there are still 4-6 job seekers for every job opening.

Voilà, a recipe for working your employees to death.

Yes, it’s domonstrably inefficient and money-losing proposition to run a business that way…at least one that doesn’t grade success by the quarterly P/L statement. But we live in an age when the people at the top, setting those policies are rewarded handsomely pretty much regardless of their actual results.

Look at Wal-Mart, for example. They cut employee hours to the point that their shelves started looking like Soviet ones circa 1984, and yet it took them well over a year of such dismal results to recognize the problem because *short term* profits were up, thanks to lowered labor costs.

Even now they’re only kind of coming around to the idea that they actually DO need workers in their stores.

“Of COURSE everyone would like leisure time. Whether we get to enjoy it or not is very much a class-based thing. (and political/social, in the case of Europe vs. the US) ”

The second part of your sentence is key. There is no reason why those of us in North America shouldn’t all get 6 weeks paid vacation. We simply lack the political will. Even the socialist party (NDP) here doesn’t include that as part of their platform.

Ah, yes. Compelled to work yourself to a nubbin to pump up the trust funds of generations yet unborn.

Imho, the argument — back when the argument could be had about labor and its place in society — shouldn’t have been about equity and fairness, who deserved what size piece of ‘the pie.’ At some point argument really should have been about the fucking pie.

At the company where I work, we don’t get 4 weeks vacation until we’ve been here 15 years.

“At the company where I work, we don’t get 4 weeks vacation until we’ve been here 15 years.”

Which is crazy. There is no reason why everyone in the developed world shouldn’t get 6 weeks off a year off and a year of parental leave.
/Of course no one ever asked me.
//Wish they would.

I don’t know anyone who’s taken four weeks of vacation. Do you?

When I worked at a regular job, I started with 3 weeks, one of which had to be at Christmas, which was considered generous as most jobs only offered two. I worked my way up to 4 weeks after some years. But the problem was you couldn’t actually use your vacation a lot of the time, and we could only accumulate 4 weeks. When you got up to 4 weeks you had to start cashing some in. When I did take vacation (between projects) I usually took 3 or 4 weeks at once since it would be a long time until I got another chance.

Now I don’t get any vacation at all, but plenty of unpaid time off.

I am from Europe, and I can say that I have too much holidays. At some point in the long gone, contracts in my sector were changed to a (nominal) 38 hours instead of 40, to make room for the unemployed. Pay is based on the 38 hours.

This means normal working weeks (typically in the 40 to 45 hours, excluding breaks, never really below 40), but the 2 hours are turned into extra holidays. This results in 8 weeks total( including Christmas etc).

I don’t want that much holidays, and neither do most people. But it acts as a good buffer against the expectations curse. You can take 4 or 5 weeks of holidays a year, and you’re still seen as a responsible employee who takes their job serious.

Wow. I need to work where you work.

Outside the US, by the sounds of it. I just started a new job and I get 26 days as standard plus one more day for each year I work here. Plus I’m on flexi-time, which means I can build up more if I work over my contracted 37.5 hours a week. Generally I don’t because of small child, but it’s nice to know. Another job in this organisation that comes without the flexi-time that was advertised recently came with 38 days. I thought that was a typo, but apparently not. The worst holiday allocation I ever had was 20 days.

Slightly off topic – or on? – what the hell is ICANN doing with that ridiculous schedule? They can’t possibly think that is going to get the best results. Is it about saving money on conference facilities? Or really about keeping out the plebs who can’t handle it?

Back to burnout.

The Pompidou had a fantastic Joan Miro retrospective once. He’d go in a certain accessible direction for a few years, then he’d tear everything up and do ugly incomprehensible things, and then suddenly start being beautiful again in a completely different and original way, over and over. The ugly stuff was so disturbing that I thought he must have been bipolar, but it seems that disorder has a shorter period; it’s more that he couldn’t resist exploring different solution spaces.

My town has an artistic tradition and First Thursday Art Walks, free wine in most galleries, which I’ve given up because pretty much every painter keeps cranking out the same thing, evidently not suffering from Miro’s itch.

I don’t think I could have something like “too much vacations”…

@Peter King 44
” I’ve long thought that the concept of “paid vacation” was more than a little paternalistic … that my employer felt it had to hold back (defer paying) part of the income I’d earned so that, when the time came for me to take my vacation, I could afford to.”

The problem is that, on the long run, if wages go down, people with just “unpaid leave” will be forced to use their free time to do another job. It’s a bit like piecework: it sounds rational but in the long run it’s a way to screw workers.

@47 “The problem is that, on the long run, if wages go down, people with just “unpaid leave” will be forced to use their free time to do another job.”

If wages go down, so will people with “paid leave”. The problem here is the adequacy of the wages, not the schedule on which it’s paid.

@48 ” The problem is that everything has become so stacked against workers that any change in managment-employee relations now, even ones that should be innocuous or beneficial, screw workers.”

I hesitate to go further off-topic, but …. Assume that I work a nominal 35-hour week (i.e. five 7-hour days) and that my employer allows me the option of working an extra half hour on the days I come in and to take a day off every second week. Remember, it’s optional … if coming in half an hour later, leaving half an hour earlier, or taking a full lunch hour is more important to me (for whatever reason) than an extra day off every two weeks, I can. I do not see how this screws me. And I’m afraid that to argue that this would not constitute a “change in management-employee relations” but that matter of whether or not one has a portion of one’s salary deferred so that one can have “paid” vacation would is to make too fine a distinction for me.

Peter King, if paid vacation is paternalistic, what else do you think is paternalistic? Mandatory breaks and 40 hour-weeks and overtime rules and what else? Unless you are a hard-core libertarian suggesting to just let everything be “negotiated” between employer and employee – and that is so ludicrous that it really doesn’t deserve rebuttal – I don’t see your point at all.

49: the flex-time arrangement you are describing is quite common in let’s say progressive work environments. How is that related to the vacation question?

This seems to translate as “I can’t think of anything better to do with my time than what my manager tells me.” Which seems terribly sad. Make some new friends. Travel. Do a MOOC. Write a novel.

There are jobs that are pretty good, and jobs in which you feel it’s satisfying to do well not because of a manager, but because it’s a good thing that needs doing. I’m not suggesting that such jobs are common – the world screams that they are not – but I understand just not taking the vacation because you’re happy enough. I tend to forget to take all of mine. Except for today.

@TM: What seems paternalistic is the notion that workers are (apt to be) so incapable of ordering their financial affairs that their employer must hold back a portion of the money that they have earned this pay period so that it can be given to them when they are on vacation (and therefore not doing whatever it is that earns them their wages). It’s a mandatory vacation lay-away plan. I just think it should be optional, so that a biweekly employee with four weeks’ vacation, let’s say, could arrange to get 2/48 = 1/24 of her salary when she is working (and nothing when she’s not working, as opposed to 1/26 of her salary every two weeks both when she’s working and when she’ s on vacation) but assume responsibility of banking the difference between 1/24 and 1/26 and having the benefit of whatever interest that investing that difference might yield. As it is, the difference stays in the employer’s bank account, and, in effect, the employer keeps the interest on it as an administrative fee.

Mandatory breaks, 40-hour work weeks, etc. have to do with one’s working conditions. What I’m talking about here is a matter of the details how one receives one’s compensation … more on the order of whether one is paid weekly versus biweekly versus monthly etc.

The flex-time issue has nothing to do with the vacation question. I offered it as a challenge to Ed’s assertion (seconded by MPAVictoria) that “any change[s] in managment-employee relations now, even ones that should be innocuous or beneficial, screw workers.” Like you, I have understood this to be a feature of “let’s say progressive work environments”.

“And mandatory Vacation time does not?”

Of course, it does. But did you not read the sentence that follows …. or the preceding paragraph?

I fear that we are arguing about apples (Apples?) and Studebakers.

” A generation later, my fist job started me with 4 weeks.”

MPAVictoria: “Wow. I need to work where you work. I have to wait 8 years to get 4 weeks.”

OTOH, how big was the fist in your job?

Zamfir: “I don’t want that much holidays, and neither do most people. ”

I disagree. Most people like vacation time, and people with children need those days off.

Peter King 04.10.14 at 5:08 pm

” @TM: What seems paternalistic is the notion that workers are (apt to be) so incapable of ordering their financial affairs that their employer must hold back a portion of the money that they have earned this pay period so that it can be given to them when they are on vacation (and therefore not doing whatever it is that earns them their wages). ”

I smell Econ 101.

I work in an FE college in the UK. Admin and other support staff start on 29 days and, although some only have term-time contracts which work slightly differently. Teaching staff get 44 days but have to work considerably over their contracted hours to complete the work they are expected to. They’ll also spend some leave time working at home or might nigh use all of their entitlement. Some teaching staff are employed through an internal agency for short periods or term-time only and receive holiday pay at at least the statutory minimum level. For the teaching staff though it seems to be the burnout-rest model. My eldest sister is just completing her first year as a primary school teacher and it is similar for her.

There is often criticism of teachers for complaining about working conditions when they get good holiday entitlement. Besides the fact their complaints are usually unrelated to working hours it seems impossible to me that good standards could be maintained without teachers getting some time to rest.

Mario, yes and teaching is one of the professions more strongly represented by unions in the UK. However, contrary to popular belief they do not take the decision to strike lightly, partly because they’ll still have to do the work from when they were out on strike.

“On the other hand, I was a teenager, and ignorant. Right-wingers who think that teachers don’t work hard enough don’t have that excuse.”

Oh Bravo!