That’s the problem with deploying play-acting as “solutions:” play-acting doesn’t actually fix the problems at the source, it simply lets the problems run to failure.

By now, we all know the name of the game is narrative control: we no longer face problems directly and attempt to solve them at their source, we play-act “solutions” that leave the actual problems unrecognized, undiagnosed and unaddressed, on the idea that if cover them up long enough they’ll magically go away.

The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything’s great, and 2) if it’s not great, it’s going to be great. Whatever’s broken is going to get fixed, AI is wunnerful, and so on. 365 Manners Kids Shoul... Eberly, Sheryl Best Price: $1.63 Buy New $7.99 (as of 07:57 UTC - Details)

All of these narratives are what I call Happy Stories in the Village of Happy People, a make-believe staging of plucky entrepreneurs minting fortunes, new leadership, technology making our lives better in every way, nonstop binge-worthy entertainment, and look at me, I’m in a selfie-worthy mis en scene that looks natural but was carefully staged to make me look like a winner in the winner-take-most game we’re all playing, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Meanwhile, off-stage in the real world, people are walking off their jobs: I quit! They’re not giving notice, they’re just quitting: not coming back from lunch, or resigning without notice.

We collect statistics in the Village of Happy People, but not about real life. We collect stats on GDP “growth,” the number of people with jobs, corporate profits, and so on. We don’t bother collecting data on why people quit, or why people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them.

Burnout isn’t well-studied or understood. It didn’t even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. It’s an amorphous topic because it covers such a wide range of human conditions and experiences.

It’s a topic that’s implicitly avoided in the Village of Happy People, where the narrative control Happy Story is: it’s your problem, not the system’s problem, and here’s a bunch of psycho-babble “weird tricks” to keep yourself glued together as the unrelenting pressure erodes your resilience until there’s none left.

Prisoners of war learn many valuable lessons about the human condition. One is that everyone has a breaking point, everyone cracks. There are no god-like humans; everyone breaks at some point. This process isn’t within our control; we can’t will ourselves not to crack. We can try, but it’s beyond our control. This process isn’t predictable. The Strong Leader everyone reckons is unbreakable might crack first, and the milquetoast ordinary person might last the longest.

Those who haven’t burned out / been broken have no way to understand the experience. They want to help, and suggest listening to soothing music, or taking a vacation to “recharge.” They can’t understand that to the person in the final stages of burnout, music is a distraction, and they have no more energy for a vacation than they have for work. Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They’re too drained to enjoy anything that’s proposed as “rejuvenating.”

We’re trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone’s reach, “just do it.” This is the core cheerleader narrative of the Village of Happy People: we can all overcome any obstacle if we just try harder. That the end-game of trying harder is collapse is taboo.

But we’re game until we too collapse. We’re mystified by our insomnia, our sudden outbursts, our lapses of focus, and as the circle tightens we jettison whatever we no longer have the energy to sustain, which ironically is everything that sustained us.

We reserve whatever dregs of energy we have for work, and since work isn’t sustaining us in any way other than financial, the circle tightens until there’s no energy left for anything. So we quit, not because we want to per se, but because continuing is no longer an option, and quitting is a last-ditch effort at self-preservation. The Secret Team: The C... L. Fletcher Prouty Best Price: $11.58 Buy New $11.87 (as of 06:10 UTC - Details)

Thanks to the Happy Stories endlessly repeated in the Village of Happy People, we can’t believe what’s happening to us. We think, this can’t be happening to me, I’m resourceful, a problem-solver, a go-getter, I have will power, so why am I banging my head against a wall in frustration? Why can’t I find the energy to have friends over?

All these experiences are viewed through the lens of the mental health industry which is blind to the systemic nature of stress and pressure, and so the “fixes” are medications to tamp down what’s diagnosed not as burnout but as depression or anxiety, in other words, the symptoms, not the cause.

And so we wonder what’s happening to us, as the experience is novel and nobody else seems to be experiencing it. Nobody seems willing to tell the truth, that it’s all play-acting: that employers “really care about our employees, you’re family,” when the reality is we’re all interchangeable cogs in the machine that focuses solely on keeping us glued together to do the work.

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The Best of Charles Hugh Smith

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