Absurd concept: we don't burn out at work because the sense of usefulness is a protective factor (resilience)

This rests on a confusion of levels that runs through all positive psychology applied to work since the 1980s.

The logic goes something like this: since one feels accomplished in their work, the individual would be protected from collapse.

First level — the category error

Personal accomplishment is not an emotion, not a feeling, not a stable trait. It is a retrospective self-evaluation produced from heterogeneous criteria — perceived competence, estimated impact, recognition received, conformity to one's own standards, sense of usefulness, quality of professional practice, atmosphere, and so on. These criteria vary independently of one another and all depend partly on the work context, but also on individual subjective preferences. Accomplishment is therefore not a stable psychological resource one possesses or loses — it is an unstable judgment the subject produces about themselves in a given context. Treating its decline as an indicator of burnout-type collapse amounts to treating a contextual judgment as a property of the subject.

Second level — the error about usefulness

Usefulness, even in caring professions, is not a feeling to be constructed or maintained. It is a structural given of the role, and the rest belongs to the inner narrative about the meaning one gives to one's action. An emergency physician knows they are useful without needing to feel it, verify it, or realize it. This certainty does not depend on working conditions — it rests on the nature of the commitment. It can coexist with profound exhaustion, somatic distress, an inability to recover, an impossibility of doing good work. Usefulness does not protect — it anchors. It maintains engagement regardless of the subject's state.

Third level — the leash

The leash is analytically distinct from usefulness and from accomplishment. The leash designates the set of costs that compel one to stay despite exhaustion: identity costs — who am I without this role? — economic costs — what does one lose by leaving in a constrained labour market? — relational costs — whom does one betray by abandoning those who depend on them? — narrative costs — how does one tell one's story if one lets go of what gave it meaning?

These costs operate independently of the sense of usefulness and independently of the sense of accomplishment. They can keep someone in a destructive commitment even when usefulness is recognised, accomplishment collapses, and exhaustion is advanced.

The leash is not a protective narrative. It is an invisible capture system that functions all the better because the subject does not perceive it as a constraint — because the costs of leaving have been internalised as reasons to stay.

Conclusion

The link usefulness → accomplishment → protection, grounded in the psychology of the 1980s and 90s, is a naïve theoretical construction of an imagined reality that presupposes three simultaneously false things: that usefulness is a feeling, that accomplishment derives from it, and that both together constitute a protective resource against exhaustion.

What real-world observation and a rigorous conceptual framework invite us to think: usefulness can be a factor of exposure, accomplishment an unstable self-evaluation filtered by context, and the leash an invisible capture mechanism that maintains engagement precisely because it is invisible.

The MBI and other burnout diagnostic tools derived from it treat the decline in personal accomplishment as a sign of burnout. They cannot see burnouts by persistence — those where accomplishment remains high because the leash holds, while the person's state collapses. These are precisely the most severe and the latest-identified burnouts — because the professional continues to perform, to tell themselves they are useful, to fulfil their role, until the fracture.

This is exactly the complex dynamic described by Max-out: a condition of capture maintained by a system that can persist for years before ending in various exits — Burnout, Bore-out, Brown-out, Workaholism, or Boring Job.