In the last decade on social media, few trends have persisted as much as the pathologisation of common behaviours and phenomena. Online, scientific-sounding terms such as “productivity dysmorphia” and “gaslighting” abound – used to describe a whole host of issues of varying severity in work and relationships. The same labels can be used to describe two completely different experiences: both an abusive relationship and a friend seeking emotional support could be described as “toxic”; both being exploited at work and spending too much money in social situations could be signs of “impostor syndrome”. Having been spread as thinly as humanly possible, these terms have lost all meaning, with their true definitions obscured by overuse and misuse. And though some terms have questionable origins, others described very real, often serious phenomena.
Of all these, none has had quite the same level of use and abuse as the term “burnout”. Defined as an “occupational phenomenon” in the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases and coined to describe the severe stress experienced by people such as doctors and nurses, “burnout” has now become a loaded term, lazily attached to almost any fatigue. On social media there is little distinction between medically-endorsed signs of burnout, such as the exhaustion experienced by intensive care doctors regularly enduring emotionally devastating 24-hour shifts, and those assigned on social media, such as the tendency to procrastinate or poor performance. Over the last five years this once useful term has had been drained of its value and meaning.
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