I’ve received several very emotional reactions about Max-out and about my claims on Burn-out.

And honestly: that’s normal.

When I say that Burn-out is a poor concept, some people hear it as a negation of their suffering.
It is not.

I am absolutely not denying the reality lived by millions of people around the world.

But I am working on something else: the mechanism that leads to the collapse, not the name we give to it.

What is often described – and was just shared with me again a moment ago: “no more sense”, “acting without reflection”, “no regulation of one’s investment” – is precisely the core of my analysis:

👉 exhaustion arises when regulation becomes impossible, when meaning itself is instrumentalized as a tool of performance.

Burn-out, in its current form, is not a concept.

It is simply the name of the break, exactly like a physician would speak of a diaphyseal fracture of the radius to describe a broken forearm.

The word designates the moment when everything gives way.

Not the process.
Not the dynamic.
Not the system that produces the collapse.

The problem is that Burn-out has become a conceptual catch-all, mixing causes, symptoms, trajectories, ideologies and guilt.

And that helps no one.
Not workers.
Not therapists.
Not organizations.
Not research.

Regarding the emotional shock some of my formulations may provoke, I understand it completely.

But it is fully intentional.

You don’t overturn a collective symbol of suffering that has become utterly hollow with gentle strokes.

Sometimes you have to disrupt to bring back thinking where words – and wounds – have been emptied of meaning.

To go further, I invite you to read the accessible synthesis of Max-out (In france but the original text is in english alos) and share your critical feedback:

👉 https://zenodo.org/records/17376416

And I am currently finalizing my next text, dedicated to the genesis of the phenomenon and its development, which reveals mechanisms that have never been described by the human sciences until now.