Burnout: 50 Years of Organized Nonsense?

What, in everything that has been done, thought, and produced, has actually changed anything?

(Prevention, policies, discourse, conceptualization, etc.)

The problem is most likely the poverty of the concept itself — a socio-media construction cobbled together to give a medical veneer to a systemic reality.

🥾 When you go hiking, everyone ends up tired… but not everyone falls.

Why do we believe we can “prevent” burnout with a list of tips, as if there were universal warning signs?

Because deep down, people keep trying to make burnout something predictable and linear… when it simply isn’t.

When you go hiking, everyone starts in a certain state and ends up tired.

And yet, not everyone breaks a leg.

This fatigue is not a reliable predictive signal.

It only makes sense within a specific context:

– physical condition,
– the terrain,
– the load carried,
– the weather,
– vigilance,
– and a hundred other variables.

It’s the combination of these factors that turns fatigue into an accident—or not.

Burnout works the same way.
It’s a fracture, not a slow fall that lets you steer away from disaster.
It’s an outcome.

Scientifically, from Freudenberger (1974) to more recent work (Maslach, Schaufeli, Leiter, WHO), burnout has never been conceptualized as a predictable, universal “phase.”

Trying to “prevent” burnout with one or two indicators is like trying to anticipate a fall in the mountains by only choosing the weather and the hiker’s shoes.

And it’s even more absurd when you remember that burnout has become a catch-all concept, distorted and stripped of scientific rigor by public discourse.

We’re pretending to anticipate a phenomenon we’re not even able to define precisely anymore — and confusing risk factors with causes.

That’s why so-called “burnout prevention” is, in practice, an empty shell.

It’s not “useless,” but it doesn’t actually prevent the accident.

Since its emergence, companies have done everything to find a workaround to burnout and avoid sick leave.

“Breathe, meditate, balance your life.” Individual tips dressed up as collective solutions.

It doesn’t work, because the real problem lies elsewhere.

The real workaround — the one that works remarkably well for most — is overinvestment and performance, disguised as autonomy, personal choice, and fulfillment.

No visible crash. No red flags.
The individual self-regulates. The system keeps running.

That’s Max-out.

The system has found its miracle recipe.

And current prevention strategies can’t do a thing about it.