In recent months, Edgar and I have both read some books relating to the phenomenon of burnout and its association with the millennial generation. Now, while there isn’t an essential character to generations, at least one of the books I read made a persuasive case that generation is useful as a proxy for changing social conditions over time.

This has led to a situation where record numbers of employees – largely around our age and younger – are leaving their jobs. This is driven by a number of factors including, most shockingly for the people who tend to write columns about the issue, pay. To a large extent, this is met with consternation, because waged employment isn’t really what people tend to think it is.

You see, the libertarian model – which is based largely on the work of Adam Smith – is that employees sell their labor to employers. Lacking capital, this is the only means by which many of them can avoid homelessness and starvation. It is, in short, a buyer/seller relationship, the way that we might conceive of the sale of a commodity or the purchase of necessary supplies. The logic goes that employing a waiter is the same kind of deal as buying a bottle of floor cleaner for that same waiter to use after close to mop up after the day’s business. Periodically, you have to purchase another set of work shifts from the employee, who is a labor-seller, just like you have to buy another bottle of pinesol – or, more likely, Fabuloso, because the scent of pine lingers and doesn’t really make people hungry.

This isn’t like slavery, not simply because it has a point of termination, but also because it doesn’t confer ownership over the person hired. Ownership implies the threefold rights of usus, fructus, and abusus. That is, right to the use, fruits of, and destruction or alienation of the thing owned. It’s more like a temporary relationship of usufruct: the employer can, within certain bounds, expect to use the employee to achieve certain ends, and benefit from the fruits of their labor. The fructus right is limited by a contract – by and large, employers cannot gift the effort of their employees to others.

Possibly in poor taste, but the best image I found in association with the fact that Frito Lay killed a worker with mandatory overtime.

However, there is no right to the abusus of a hired employee: this is exactly what is used to paint characters as villainous in uncreative action movies – the man with the white cat decides that such and such henchman did a bad enough job that they simply kill him. This is part of the outrage behind many of the recent strikes: employees dying on the clock due to inimical work conditions. By and large, it is considered monstrous to abuse or destroy an employee (though there are certainly segments of the American population that are less sensitive to this than others).

It occurs to me that the current regime of work – often thought of as Taylorism – is a different animal, and our conceptions of work haven’t really caught up.

What is happening isn’t the rental of a person to engage in a labor-task for a stretch of time. What is happening, especially but not solely in salaried labor, is that the employee is selling rights to an essential, interchangeable, and immaterial resource: their time and attention. This is often treated as a relation of ownership: I’ve certainly worked in at least one office where the owner felt she had the right to waste my time or attention on things outside the purview of the job and felt offended by my taking steps to preserve my attention for the performance of the job (in this case, by bringing in headphones to listen to music while proofreading documents).

In this situation, the employee is not what is being hired – they’re a container for a certain amount of time, attention, and effort. When they are hired, the employer feels that they have bought – and have ownership over – that time, attention, and effort.

Let’s step back for a minute. The point of Taylorism is to parse every step of a work-task out into perfectly measured units and then increase efficiency to the limit by cutting everything in excess of the necessary task. It is here that the Jevons Paradox – also known as the efficiency paradox – rears its head: Williams Stanley Jevons noted in 1865 that increased efficiency in steam engines actually increased the amount of coal being burned. After all, it was a more efficient fuel source now, so we can use it for more things.

You see, while increases in efficiency could be turned to getting the same output for less input, this is not the common approach. Most often, it is turned to the end of getting greater output for less input. It’s the same problem as what city planners call Induced Travel Demand – the fact that adding a lane to a busy street doesn’t reduce traffic but increases it.

With the start of the neoliberal consensus in the 1970s, what is being extracted from workers isn’t just their vitality (remember, in anticapitalist media, the capitalist is often portrayed as a vampire, draining the worker of blood and energy), but often their attention, creativity, and empathy. Much as crude oil tends to be a more efficient energy source than coal for many applications, so too does the service economy not run on simple muscle-power. It requires new resources, and it extracts them with ever greater rapidity.

An image from Hieronymus Wierix depicting acedia — which is either sloth or depression, depending on the interpretation.

This is where burnout – the condition associated most closely with the millennial generation – comes from: the condition of having had one’s stockpile of attention, creativity, and empathy overdrawn. While this is, thankfully, often a temporary situation, we cannot say that it doesn’t have long-term effects because we haven’t studied it. While acute burnout is no doubt something that is recognized and understood, can we really say that none among us suffer from what can be called chronic burnout? The apathetic resignation brought on by having the most precious parts of ourselves hollowed out, again and again, just to keep the lights on?

This is what leads to our current situation, where employees have decided to exercise their right to simply get up and leave instead of continue having their attention, creativity, and empathy strip-mined from them and turned into fuel for the machineries of capital. The consternation of the employers puts me in mind of portrayals of extractive industrialists – oil barons, mine owners, and the like – who know there is a motherload that they don’t legally have the right to exploit. They view it as theirs by right.

All of this, I feel, hinges on the misunderstanding of employment that I outlined earlier, as an exchange of rights for money. Personally, I feel that the construction of “rights” as possessions is merely a fiction created to allow these rights to be deprived in one way or another.

Perhaps an alternate conception is possible: consider, when you clock on, that you are exchanging a vital and limited resource – the effort of your body, the creativity and empathy of your mind – for something that wild animals get for free. It seems to me that, far from being an equitable arrangement agreed to by equals – where, temporarily, a condition of inequality is agreed to – this is a coercive one – where one party uses differential access to resources to force the other party to acknowledge an inequality that the first party views as self-evident.

Quite simply, an alternative must be possible, and it seems to me that only by pursuing alternate conceptions of rights can alternate relations be secured. I’m feeling a spot of burnout myself at the moment – it’s been a long semester, and I’ve had other things that I need to work on – so I’ll be leaving that for future discussion.

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Tapped: The Psychic Cost of Contemporary Work