Work has changed. But have our frameworks for explaining its reality — and its suffering?

And I’m not talking about describing it.

I’m talking about theorizing it.

You can describe an apple falling in a thousand different ways.

What matters, if you want to understand it, is explaining why it falls.

We should not confuse the description of a phenomenon with the explanation of the mechanisms that produce it.

And yet, I increasingly get the feeling that this confusion has become the norm — including among the most established experts in the field.

The Maginot Line syndrome in occupational health.

I have a fear, and I want to share it.

I fear that we may be losing part of the battle for mental health because we are still fighting with maps drawn between the 1970s and the 2000s.

But why remain so attached to a deck of cards if some of the cards are missing?

And more importantly: why keep using it as though it still represented the entire territory?

An entire generation of experts was trained within theoretical frameworks that became deeply institutionalized.

Concepts were developed.

Schools of thought were built.

Training programs emerged.

Then specific practices, interventions, and forms of support were created around them.

There is nothing unusual about that.

The problem begins when the framework starts being mistaken for reality itself.

Because while all of this was happening, the system did not stand still.

It mutated.

Today, a pathogenic organization does not merely impose workloads, intensify pace, or ignore the realities of actual work.

It does something far more powerful.

It recruits our desire.

It instrumentalizes our desire to “do a good job.”

It hacks our need for validation — including the kind of validation we learned to seek very early on at school.

It turns our professional conscience into fuel for our own self-alienation.

This is what I call Max-out.

The problem?

Traditional prevention tools struggle to see this phenomenon.

Why?

Because Max-out does not necessarily look like suffering in the way we have been trained to recognize it.

It can look like the “natural” effects of commitment.

Like passion.

Like someone who genuinely cares about their work.

Like someone who wants to be beyond reproach.

Like someone who simply believes that, after all, they have to earn their salary.

And the “signals” we observe may have many possible causes — causes around which we are then remarkably good at constructing a coherent story.

As long as we fail to analyze this constructed complicity between the individual — conditioned early on to seek certain forms of validation — and a system capable of exploiting that disposition, we risk treating the manifestations without fully understanding the mechanism.

We are still looking at the front line of the task.

Meanwhile, part of the conflict has moved elsewhere:

into what we want to become,

into what we believe we have to prove,

into the way we relate our performance to our own value,

directly into our Ego Ideal.

And this may be where the problem becomes theoretical as much as clinical.

Acknowledging that a framework cannot see everything means accepting that it has blind spots.

That some explanations need to be completed.

That some mechanisms may simply not have been thought through far enough.

A theory stops being a useful tool when defending it becomes more important than seeing what it can no longer explain.