[silk] Flaming Out

[Udhay Shankar N]

Via Eugen, a nice piece on a topic we discuss every so often.
Udhay

http://www.nymag.com/news/features/24757

Can’t Get No Satisfaction
In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith.

* By Jennifer Senior

People who are suffering from burnout tend to 
describe the sensation in metaphors of 
emptiness—they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, 
a drained battery that can no longer hold its 
charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens 
of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, a 
professor at Columbia Teachers College and 
trained psychotherapist, realized he was feeling 
this way. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted 
with the symptoms. He was a burnout researcher himself.

Being burned out on burnout—now that was rich. 
Madame Curie died of radiation poisoning; Joseph 
Mitchell famously developed a 32-year-long case 
of writer’s block after writing a two-part New 
Yorker series about a blocked writer; now Farber 
was suffering the same self-referential fate. He 
jokes about it today (who wouldn’t?) but hardly 
felt sanguine as it was happening (who would?). 
Colleagues tried to persuade him to stick it out. 
“But for the most part, I’ve resisted coming 
back,” says Farber. “I’ve never been able to find 
that same sense of satisfaction.”

Farber had burned out once before. Back in the 
late sixties and early seventies, he taught 
public school in East Harlem. He’d wanted to help 
people, do the world some good. Yet for four 
years he’d struggled to stop his students from 
fighting with one another, and in spite of his 
best efforts he couldn’t even teach all of them 
to read. His classroom became a perverse 
experiment in physics, with energy never 
conserved (input always exceeded output), and he, 
a teacher in perpetual motion, always craving 
rest. Eventually, he began to pull away from his 
students—depersonalization, as the literature now 
calls it—justifying his seeming insensitivity by 
telling himself he wasn’t making a difference 
anyway. It was only when Farber went to graduate 
school at Yale that he learned that this syndrome 
had a name: Burnout. “The concept offered a 
perfect understanding of what teachers were 
feeling,” he recalls. “It wasn’t in fact that 
they were racist and mercenary and noncaring but 
that their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results.”

Farber was so captivated by the notion of burnout 
he made it the subject of his dissertation. And 
he stayed with it for another thirteen years. 
Until the day he couldn’t anymore. He still 
remembers the breaking point. He’d just completed 
a book about burnout among teachers, a subject 
he’d once considered exceptionally urgent. “Yet 
even as I was writing,” he says, “I had this 
sense that I really wanted to finish it so that I 
could go on to something else. I felt somewhat 
bored, and somewhat depleted. I’d said all I 
wanted to say.” He ponders this point. “I guess,” 
he says, “I lost the sense that it was important.”

I can’t quite say that I’ve ever had the full-on 
Farber experience. But I’ve certainly had 
mini-versions of it. Whenever I’ve finished a big 
project, for instance, or whenever I’ve found 
myself listening to the 10 p.m. whir of the 
vacuum cleaners in our office start up for the 
tenth night in a row, there’s no one I identify 
with more than the Bill Murray character in 
Rushmore, particularly as he’s blankly tossing 
golf balls from a wire basket into his swimming 
pool. It’s not that I don’t love my work. But 
hold a stethoscope to my brain, eavesdrop on my 
innermost thoughts, and at those moments, all 
you’ll hear is the sound of a whistling conch shell.

Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic 
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s 
not something that can be treated 
pharmacologically; it is not considered the same 
thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though 
sometimes they coincide. The term was first 
coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert 
Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from 
Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. (“I 
haven’t enough feeling left for human beings,” 
the book’s numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his 
journal, “to do anything for them out of pity.”) 
While working at a free clinic for drug addicts 
in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the 
volunteers, when discouraged, would often push 
harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as 
if they were achieving less and less. The result, 
in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of 
High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.

Back in the seventies, when people marched into 
the world with convictions about changing it, 
burnout was considered a noble affliction. It 
meant that you’d depleted yourself while helping 
others. Almost all the research that’d been done 
on the subject, and there’d been quite a lot, was 
on the people in the “caring professions”—nurses, 
public-school teachers, legal-aid workers, social 
workers, clergy. Because many of these people 
were idealists, and because they worked with the 
hardest-luck cases, they were highly susceptible 
to disillusionment. Those who burned out were not 
only physically and mentally exhausted; they were 
cynical, detached, convinced their efforts were 
worthless. They held themselves in contempt. 
Worse, they held their clients in contempt. They 
began to loathe the same people they originally 
sought to help. In her seminal book Burnout: The 
Cost of Caring, Christina Maslach, perhaps the 
best-known burnout researcher working in the 
United States today, collected plenty of vivid, 
unvarnished testimony. As one Florida social 
worker told her, “I recently received a call at 
night, and while I was getting dressed, I was 
screaming and cursing these motherfuckers for 
calling me with their goddamned problems.”

Today, in New York City, everyone knows that the 
ones “screaming and cursing these motherfuckers 
for calling me with their goddamned problems” are 
as likely to be hedge-fund managers as any 
species of do-gooders. Burnout is the illness of 
just about any averagely driven, obsessive New 
York professional. Bankers, high-tech workers, 
advertisers, management consultants, lawyers 
working in their mustard-lit honeycombed 
Hades—all of them are as likely to complain about 
burnout as schoolteachers and social workers. In 
21st-century New York, the 60-hour week is 
considered normal. In some professions, it’s a 
status symbol. But burnout, for the most part, is 
considered a sign of weakness, a career killer.

“My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, 
a therapist to both corporate attorneys and men 
on Wall Street. He’s young, about the age of a 
hungry broker, and he looks like the men he 
treats—strong features, dark teased hair, 
Turnbull & Asser striped shirt, nice watch. “They 
have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,” he 
continues. “Their expectations of success are 
through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t 
match up with their expectations, it leads to 
burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.”

Cass is the opposite of a rumpled therapist or 
academic who might have studied burnout in the 
seventies. He’s today’s version, a $350-an-hour 
executive coach, someone who accommodates busy 
schedules by meeting over lunch or at baseball 
games and speaks in the idiom of Wall Street. His 
clients, too, are the inside-out version of the 
burned-out altruists people were examining in the 
seventies: Unblushingly ambitious, rich, focused 
as Marines. Yet ask Cass why his clients are 
burning out, and his answer isn’t any different 
for a banker than it would be for a public-school 
teacher; there’s a gulf between what they 
expected from their jobs and what they got. “I 
can’t tell you,” he says, “how many people come 
into my office and ask, ‘How come I have this 
money and I can’t find happiness?’ ”

So what does he tell them? “That happiness equals 
reality divided by expectations.”

I look around Cass’s office and realize it’s the 
perfect hybrid of a shrink’s suite and a bond 
trader’s bachelor pad: a seascape of black 
leather, that mysterious favorite fabric of rich 
young men, on the one hand; a menagerie of 
curios, totems, and exotica on the other. (Though 
maybe there’s a slight bias toward the bachelor 
pad—further inspection reveals a Wall Street 
movie poster in the corner, a bronze bull on the 
coffee table, and a squishy stress-ball he 
encourages his stymied clients to throw.)

Our instinct, of course, is not to feel much pity 
for the poor bond trader. An epidemic of malaise 
among bankers and lawyers is far more likely to 
inspire jokes—Wouldn’t it be nicer if it were 
terminal?—than concern and rafts of psychological 
studies. (And the few studies out there are 
funny, if inadvertently. In a special “burnout” 
issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology six 
years ago, the essay on lawyers was most notable 
for the “Select References and Recommended 
Reading” that followed—four of eight were about 
masochism.) But that doesn’t make the phenomenon 
any less real. In fact, consider lawyers for a 
moment: According to the New York Bar 
Association, turnover rates among mid-level 
associates in this city’s law firms is 36 
percent. The whole system is predicated on 
burnout. Why even bother treating associates well?

It is possible something is the matter here. Just 
as there were deep flaws in the work ecosystems 
of the caring professions, noticed by researchers 
in the seventies, it’s possible there’s something 
wrong with our professional environments—and 
perhaps, more broadly speaking, our culture of 
work. Isn’t this worthy of examination? Work, 
after all, is a form of religion in a secular 
world. Burning out in it amounts to a crisis of faith.

“In the beginning, the caring professions were 
where the issue was,” says Maslach. “But frankly, 
it’s also where we could do the research. Not all 
professions say, ‘Sure, come on in and poke 
around and see what we’re doing and who we are.’ ”

But today, says Maslach, corporate settings are 
cautiously, slowly, cracking their doors, letting 
people like her in, because they recognize that 
something’s gone awry. “Like in Silicon Valley,” 
she says. “It used to be the case that people 
would say, ‘You’re burned out? You don’t like the 
job? So quit. I don’t run a country club,’ ” says 
Maslach. “But what was happening was the best and 
the brightest wanted to opt out. They started 
saying, ‘I can’t do this; this is not a life.’ 
They’d go to the Midwest and start a pet-food 
store.” Maslach adds that when she did interviews 
at nasa, she noticed similar problems there. “So 
suddenly, these places were saying, ‘Whoa, what 
do we need to do to get these people?’ Getting 
the most out of people didn’t actually mean 
getting the best. That’s when there was a new wave of interest in burnout.”

She pauses for a second, searching for the right 
metaphor. “It’s kind of like ergonomics,” she 
finally says. “It used to be, ‘You sit for work? 
Here’s a chair.’ But now we design furniture to 
fit and support the body. And we’re doing the 
same here. The environments themselves have to 
say, ‘We want people to thrive and grow.’ There 
was a shift, finally, in how people understood the question.”

Like the science of all emotion, attempts to 
quantify, analyze, and define burnout have a 
slightly stilted, unnatural quality. It’s a 
problem that’s both physical and existential, an 
untidy agglomeration of external symptoms and 
private frustrations—how could such stuff be 
plotted on a graph? (I keep thinking of Bill 
Murray and those golf balls—or Bill Murray and 
his Suntory whiskeys in Lost in Translation, for 
that matter. Does a culture even need a 
definition of burnout when it has Bill Murray?) 
But researchers have nevertheless made valiant 
efforts to try. In 1981, Maslach, now 
vice-provost at the University of California, 
Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed 
survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, 
to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any 
one of the following six problems can fry us to a 
crisp: working too much; working in an unjust 
environment; working with little social support; 
working with little agency or control; working in 
the service of values we loathe; working for 
insufficient reward (whether the currency is 
money, prestige, or positive feedback). “I once 
talked to a pediatric dentist,” she says, “and he 
said, ‘A good day is when there are no 
screamers.’ And I’m sure half the people he was 
talking about were the parents.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Maslach’s 
research is that burnout isn’t necessarily a 
result of overwork. It can be, certainly. Michael 
Leiter, a lovely Canadian fellow and frequent 
collaborator of Maslach’s, has elegantly called 
burnout a “crisis in self-efficacy,” which to me 
suggests that head-banging feeling of struggling 
mightily for too little or (worse) nothing in 
return. Ayala Pines, a researcher in Israel who’s 
looked at burnout in all sorts of inspired 
contexts (including marriage), rather 
heartbreakingly sums up the problem as “the 
failure of the existential quest”—that moment 
when we wake up one morning and realize that what 
we’re doing has appallingly little value. She 
studied the insurance business, for example, a 
profession often associated with the ultimate 
cubicle tedium. Yet she noticed something very 
interesting. “The ones who had some traumatic 
experience related to insurance when they were 
children—their house burned down or whatever—they 
can work for a long time without burning out,” 
she says. “Because they came to the profession 
with a calling. They feel their work is significant.”

And Farber often calls burnout “the gap between 
expectation and reward,” which may have the most 
relevance to New Yorkers. This has always been a 
city of inflated expectations. People with more 
modest aims for themselves seem less prone to disillusionment.

Longitudinal, comprehensive data on burnout is 
hard to come by, in part because the United 
States is not especially renowned for its 
sensitivity to workers. (The Bureau of Labor 
Statistics, an admirable organization with lots 
of dedicated economists, does not track worker 
satisfaction, for example.) One of the few 
countries that does keep comprehensive data on 
burnout is, not surprisingly, the Netherlands, 
where the government is sensitive to the 
workplace needs of its citizenry. Even there, 
longitudinal surveys show that roughly 10 percent 
of the workforce is burned out at any given time, 
with high-school teachers and primary-care health 
personnel ranking highest. (I asked Wilmar 
Schaufeli, perhaps the most prominent researcher 
of burnout in the Netherlands today, whether he 
had any data on bankers. “In Holland,” he says, 
“these groups are not big enough to study. But I 
do know there have been some reports in the press 
about stockbrokers who use cocaine and other 
illicit drugs just to keep up. But this is 
another story.”) Still, enough research has been 
done in the United States and elsewhere to reveal 
interesting patterns of burnout. Though loath to 
say that any one profession burns us out more 
than others—to her, it’s more a question of how 
well we fit in our jobs—Maslach found in her 
early work that the critical burnout period for 
most social-service agencies was between one and 
five years on the job. (Interestingly, Stuart 
Marques, a spokesman for the United Federation of 
Teachers, notes that 45 percent of New York City 
public-school teachers have left their jobs by 
year five.) Of all her studies both in Israel and 
abroad, Pines found that the most-burned-out 
people were nurses working in children’s burn 
units—“It was too painful”—and the least were 
serial entrepreneurs, those metabolic wonders 
creating companies as if they were baking cakes.

In 2001, the Department of Surgery at the 
University of Michigan used the Maslach inventory 
to conduct a comprehensive study of burnout among 
its graduates from various residencies. It showed 
a striking rate of high emotional exhaustion 
among practicing surgeons (32 percent) and a 
rather low rate of depersonalization (13 
percent), all of which seemed to utterly belie 
the notion that surgeons were unfeeling 
technocrats. The conclusion also said that there 
was no correlation between exhaustion and 
caseload. “It has much more to do with 
frustrations in the changes in medicine,” says 
Lazar J. Greenfield, one of the study’s 
co-investigators and the chairman emeritus of 
Michigan’s Department of Surgery. “The liability 
risk is higher, the patients are more demanding, 
reimbursements have progressively declined.”

To me, the most beguiling data to emerge from 
burnout research are the profiles of the people 
who experience it most acutely. In her early 
work, for instance, Maslach found that younger 
people burn out more often than older people, a 
finding that turns up again and again both here 
and abroad. (In fact, that study from the 
University of Michigan explicitly said that 
younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older 
ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, 
because we associate burning out somehow with 
midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of 
burnout as the gap between expectations and 
rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have 
more perspective and more experience; it’s the 
young idealists who go flying into a profession, 
plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed 
into a wall. Maslach also found that married 
people burn out less often than single people, as 
long as their marriages are good, because they 
don’t depend as much on their jobs for 
fulfillment. And childless people, though 
unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, 
tend to burn out far more than people with kids. 
(This, too, has been found across cultures; in 
the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of 
Statistics showed that twice as many working 
women without children showed symptoms of burnout 
as did working women with underage children.) 
It’s much easier to disproportionately invest 
emotional and physical capital in the office if 
you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.

“I did a study in the south of Israel of 
‘sandwich generation’ couples—people who have 
young children and elderly parents,” says Ayala 
Pines, the Israeli researcher. “This is very 
stressful, but what I found is that these people 
were not that burned out at all, because their 
families also provided emotional support.”

Pines’s work has also shown that people in 
fiercely individualist societies are more prone 
to burn out. “I once did a study comparing 
Mexican college professors to American college 
professors,” she says. “The Mexican burnout rate 
was lower. To them, the kind of lifestyle you 
describe in New York is insane. At noon, you come 
home, eat, and see your family. It isn’t even a 
question.” In Israel, she adds, she consistently 
found lower levels of burnout than in her studies 
in the United States, even though the lives of 
its citizens are tangibly threatened in a way 
that most Americans’ are not. “And one 
explanation I have,” she says, “is that it’s 
because of the existential threats to our daily 
lives. You feel your own life is more significant.”

Of course, Maslach also found that there are 
certain types—depressives, people with problems 
with anger or anxiety—who are more prone to burn 
out. And if you’re inclined to look at the world 
through the prism of psychoanalysis, you’ll 
realize there are an almost infinite number of 
reasons why people choose the wrong kinds of jobs 
for themselves. Pines says it best. “I think one 
of the reasons people burn out is because they 
take jobs that they hope, consciously or 
unconsciously, will help them overcome unresolved 
childhood issues,” she says. “But instead of 
healing the childhood wound, work reopens it.”

Woo hoo. Re: An appendix to the principles of 
Jewish Buddhism. Saying hi. Re: Hey pal. Burnout. 
WHEN are we eating? Open Enrollment Info. Quick q. Arrrrrrrrrrgh.

You are looking at nine e-mail subject lines I 
received in a one-hour period last week. It was 
then that I realized I answer an e-mail once 
every 6.66 minutes. The very thought of 
committing this fact to paper has kept me 
crippled for several seconds. It doesn’t seem 
like the sort of thing my boss should know.

One has to wonder whether the developments of a 
high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse. 
First, the obvious: With the advent of e-mail, 
cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys (or 
“CrackBerrys”—the argot here seems extremely 
apt), and other bits of high-speed doodadry, it 
has become virtually impossible, in senses both 
literal and metaphorical, to unplug from our 
jobs. As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, 
one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t 
just work overload but “work-home interference”—a 
sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone 
calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to 
clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.

But the problems wrought by technological 
advancement go far beyond trespasses into our 
homes. They’ve done something to how we perceive 
time—and, by extension, work and leisure—itself. 
There’s a way New Yorkers often describe this, 
actually. They say they’re busy. It’s hard to 
find New Yorkers who don’t believe themselves to 
be really, really busy, whether they have six 
kids or none, and whether they’re trading bonds 
or driving cabs. “Busyness”—a homophone of 
business, which cannot be an accident—has become 
the defining sensation of city life. If busy 
meant “fulfilled,” or “engaged,” that’d be one 
thing, but it seems, in most cases, to mean 
“overloaded” or “frazzled.” In Faster: The 
Acceleration of Just About Everything, James 
Gleick points out that doctors and sociologists 
even have a name for this harried sensation: “hurry sickness.”

The great paradox of efficiency is that the more 
we speed up, the more acute our frustrations when 
we’re forced to slow down. Is it not possible 
that these ambient frustrations function as 
chronic stressors, and—in some subtle but crucial 
way—contribute to feeling worn out? Americans, 
Gleick writes, spend an estimated 3 billion 
minutes a year waiting on hold with the software 
industry; they race to airports only to wait for 
hours; they start to jitter inside elevators if 
the doors take more than four seconds to close. 
(Elevator engineers even have a term for how long 
it takes—door dwell—before people start jamming 
their fingers on the door close button, which is 
usually a placebo, a function already disabled by 
litigation-conscious building managers.)

“Gridlocked and tarmacked are metonyms of our 
era,” Gleick writes. “To be gridlocked or 
tarmacked is to be stuck in place, our fastest 
engines idling all around us, as time passes and blood pressures rise.”

Though it’s not quite the same thing, I often 
feel gridlocked when answering my e-mail. My 
friends would probably be startled to learn this, 
because my e-mails ricochet back within seconds, 
as if attached to a rubber band. But it’s hard to 
escape the sensation, as I answer each and every 
one, that I’m being stopped at a tollbooth.

If one of the surest recipes for burnout, as 
Michael Leiter has said, is the sensation of 
inefficiency—particularly if we’re still 
expending energy and seeing little in return—then 
there may be something about the modern office 
that conspires to burn us out. In 2005, a 
psychiatrist at King’s College London did a study 
in which one group was asked to take an IQ test 
while doing nothing, and a second group to take 
an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and 
ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did 
better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t 
much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that 
the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of 
six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned.

That’s right. Stoned. Those people were literally 
burned out, and they did better.

“There is something about interruption that makes 
people especially unproductive,” says Suzanne 
Bianchi, a sociology professor at the University 
of Maryland and co-author of the new book 
Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. “And 
technology interrupts us all the time—e-mails, 
cell phones. It feeds into our sense of 
control”—another key factor in burning out, 
feeling a lack of control—“and highly educated 
workers all will talk as if they’re terribly 
overworked, how they feel as if there’s never 
enough time. Partly, we’re supposed to say it, 
but I think people also genuinely feel that way, 
even though they have the time. That’s what’s 
intrigued us. The subjective and the objective don’t line up.”

Indeed, that’s her colleagues’ most startling 
finding of all. Most Americans believe they work 
more today than they did 35 years ago. Yet 
according to the American Time Use Survey, an 
ambitious project that for 41 years has been 
asking thousands of participants to keep detailed 
time diaries, Americans now have five more hours 
of leisure per week (38) than they did in 1965. 
Certainly, there are academics who reject these 
numbers—in The Overworked American, published in 
1992, the economist Juliet Schor calculated we 
were working nearly an extra month per year, 
setting off a rather sharp debate about her 
methodology—but even those who agree our leisure 
time is increasing will readily concede that 
Americans experience their leisure quite 
differently and therefore may feel as if they’re 
working more. For one thing, it’s non-contiguous 
leisure time, time meted out in discrete 
increments. Human beings have always resisted the 
fracturing of time. Gleick points out that 
Plautus cursed the sundial. Now, he says, we gain 
90- second reprieves with our microwave ovens. 
But do we do anything meaningful in those 90 
seconds? Or do they vanish in the same particle puff?

John Robinson, the University of Maryland 
sociologist who calculated those expanding 
leisure hours for the time-use survey, argues 
that our obsession with efficiency at work has 
unfortunately seeped into our attitudes toward 
leisure, with the multitasking of our downtime as 
the loony and paradoxical result. We run on the 
treadmill while listening to music while watching 
TV. We cook while flipping through a magazine 
while yakking on the phone. All of which raises a 
question: If our leisure isn’t restorative, aren’t we more apt to burn out?

“Oh, yes, I would think so,” says Schaufeli. 
“Because that’s what burnout is, in essence. A 
mismatch between effort and recovery.”

Alden Cass is sitting in his office, showing me 
his various tools for reigniting burned-out 
clients. “I created this thing, 
bullish-versus-bearish thinking,” he says. He 
hands me a worksheet with silhouettes of bulls 
and bears. “I give them for homework so they can 
monitor their thoughts,” he continues. “Usually, 
when you’re burnt out, your first thought is 
vicious, irrational. What we call bearish. So 
they start monitoring what goes on in their 
heads. And once they have evidence, they can 
redirect those thoughts. They have ammo now.”

Because Cass is an executive coach, it’s his job 
to tell people how to assume responsibility for 
their own distress. But Maslach has always 
contended that burnout says more about the 
employer than it does about the employee. 
“Imagine investigating the personality of 
cucumbers to discover why they had turned into 
sour pickles,” she famously wrote in 1982, 
“without analyzing the vinegar barrels in which 
they’d been submerged!” The trouble is that 
corporate America has always been leery of the 
presence of burnout researchers. When Cass tried 
writing his dissertation about Wall Street 
burnout, he was turned away from every 
human-resources office downtown. Maslach’s not 
surprised. “Anything that might suggest that 
something is not working well in a company or an 
organization of some kind, people then worry, 
This could be used for a lawsuit,” she says. “So 
doing research is fraught with peril.”

But today, Maslach and her colleague, Michael 
Leiter, are attempting longitudinal studies of 
employees in a variety of companies and 
institutions, hoping they can find early-warning 
signals of distress. Some of what they’ve found 
has been pretty amazing. In a university system, 
for instance, Maslach discovered that a certain 
employee award, designed with the best of 
intentions, was making people nuts. “You could 
not have designed a better award to engender 
backbiting and hostility,” she says.

Milton Moskowitz, co-author of Fortune magazine’s 
annual “100 Best Companies to Work For,” keeps a 
mini-compendium of things that companies do to 
prevent burnout. Intel, for example, allows its 
employees to take an eight-week sabbatical once 
every seven years. (Of course, most Europeans 
take this much vacation every year, but still.) 
The managers at Boston Consulting Group place 
their consultants in a metaphorical “Red Zone” if 
they work 60 hours a week and send someone to 
come talk to them if the trend continues. And 
once a quarter, Dow Corning has a no-meetings week.

But it’s an uphill battle. Moskowitz also tells 
me about a conversation he once had with an 
employee at a high-profile high-tech firm. He 
reached this young man during the day, but only 
barely, because this fellow was heading out to 
see a movie. Moskowitz marveled at how wonderful 
that was and how flexible his employer must be. 
“Oh, yes,” the employee told him. “Here, I can 
work whatever 80 hours per week I want.”

“The worst case of Wall Street burnout I know is 
of this guy who wound up driving a cab,” Cass tells me.

A cab?

He shrugs. “There’s a control factor in driving a 
cab. You go from point A to point B. On Wall 
Street, you start your day with no idea how it’s going to end.”

driving a taxi doesn’t sound like a particularly 
soothing solution to burnout. But there’s 
something to the idea of changing jobs. Maybe 
extreme burnout victims don’t need a life coach 
or a sabbatical or a no-meetings week. Maybe what they need is a headhunter.

Usually, I can’t imagine taking up another 
career. But in the rare moments I do, my 
fantasies tend to run in an altruistic direction: 
Teach high-school English in a poor school 
district. Fight poverty in Africa. Donate a 
kidney. And I wonder how many of my 
contemporaries share these fantasies or have 
actually done it—that is, made a change in their 
lives that actually relieves them from the 
crushing burdens of thinking about themselves. 
How strange would it be if people were trying to 
cure their burnout today by leaping to the 
helping professions, the same professions that 
led people to study burnout in the first place?

This July, the Boston Globe ran a startling story 
that said 64 percent of all students entering 
mortuary college today are over 30, rather than 
23, which they were a generation ago. 
(“Frequently, these students want to emulate a 
wonderful job that a funeral professional did for 
them,” Lyn Prendergast, executive vice-president 
of Fine Mortuary College, told the Globe. “Or 
they had a poor experience and feel they can do a 
far better job for the bereaved.”) Of the 75 law 
firms surveyed in New York in The American 
Lawyer’s recent survey of mid-level associates, 
the firms ranked No. 1 (Dickstein Shapiro) and 
No. 3 (Patterson Belknap) had one thing in 
common: They both received perfect scores on 
their attitudes toward pro bono work.

I phone Barbara G. Wheeler, the president of 
Auburn Theological Seminary. She tells me that 
the average age of female students entering divinity school is 37.

Thirty-seven. My age exactly. If only I weren’t a 
Jew and an atheist, I’d be in business.

“Every seminary can introduce you to at least 
some students who’ve been lawyers, journalists, 
opera singers,” she says. “They have a lot of 
tolerance for the little annoyances of the job, 
because they want to deal with life-and-death 
issues—the moments when people tend to be most human, as Bill Coffin said.”

Lindley DeGarmo, the pastor and head of staff at 
Towson Presbyterian Church in Maryland, harbored 
such desires. It was Wheeler who put me in touch 
with him. DeGarmo enrolled at Union Theological 
Seminary in 1996, when he was 42 years old. He 
sometimes jokes that the decision cost him, 
conservatively speaking, $6 million, because he 
missed the peak of the boom. At the time, he was 
pulling in nearly a million dollars annually on 
Wall Street and living in a 3,000-square-foot 
apartment in Brooklyn Heights. “Maybe I’d have 
done more good if I’d worked for a few more years 
and then given the seminary the money,” he says. 
Though perhaps it’s just as well. Just before 
entering the seminary, DeGarmo was considering a 
job with an intriguing company called Enron.

DeGarmo says he can’t isolate the moment that he 
knew his job wasn’t for him. “I’ve never been 
able to make the direct correlation: Hmm, I’m 
here on Monday morning, and I don’t like the 
values—wouldn’t it be nice to minister?” he says. 
“But when I fantasized about what I wanted to do, 
it was this.” Particularly after he reached 40 
and finally married. He started devouring 
theological texts. He started attending church in 
New York, where for the first time he 
“encountered really good preaching, exegesis, 
grappling with the larger tradition of the 
church.” Then came the moment, just after his 
child was born, when he was sitting in a lonely 
hotel on a fruitless business trip. He had 
absolutely no clue what he was doing there.

“There are times when this is much more difficult 
work than what I dealt with as an investment 
banker,” he says. “It draws on a whole lot more 
parts of you. You get personally invested. I did 
27 funerals last year. It can be draining. But by 
and large, the joys outweigh the sorrows.

“In seminary,” he suddenly says, “I did a bit of 
depth psychology.” DeGarmo had never studied it 
before. He was assigned Memories, Dreams, 
Reflections, and found himself beguiled by Carl 
Jung’s theories about the opposing parts of our 
personalities. “I remember Jung saying that the 
general trajectory of your life is to work to 
your strength in your younger life, going great 
guns to establish yourself at whatever you’re 
doing,” he continues. “But at some point in 
midlife, the other part of your personality—the 
feminine instead of masculine, or whatever other 
opposing trait—is looking for expression. And if 
you don’t allow it to express itself, you’re not, 
in effect, going to become a whole person. Brittle is the word he uses.”

He’s recalling this so fondly and so lyrically 
that I find myself caught in his same reverie. 
It’s hard to imagine this man was once a guy in a Town Car on Wall Street.

“So it occurs to me that maybe people who are 
burning out are bumping up against that 
phenomenon that Jung talks about,” concludes 
DeGarmo. “The masculine bumping up against the 
feminine, or the right brain against the left. Whoever you are.”

It’s a lovely sentiment, almost fit for a sermon. 
The question now is how many Wall Streeters he can convert.




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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))