Dr. Cal Newport

What I think is burning people out is they're now in this state where they're saying, I'm spending most of my day talking about work, sending emails, attending meetings.

Very little time is left to actually make progress on the work.

And then the workload gets larger and larger.

This by itself is deranging, right?

It feels like you're in some sort of nihilistic experiment.

Like, what is this?

Why do I have six hours in meetings?

I'm not actually – this can't be the right way to work.

And then what happens, of course, is you have to recover time in the morning and the afternoon, maybe after your kids go to bed, to try to actually make progress.

So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue.

So you're working more hours.

There's an energy drain.

But I think that psychological piece –

of this can't possibly make sense that like i'm checking email once every two minutes and spent six hours in zoom like doing very little actual high value work like this can't be the right way to work that's what i think the burnout epidemic right now is coming from is it's that psychological component of we all know this is stupid but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on we all know that the amount of email and meetings i'm doing is such a waste of my salary

Like this is a highly trained brain.

Like I could be writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies, but we're all just accepting this.

So I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is just, we also have to add these extra hours.

There's just like a straight aggregation of work quantity.

And no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense.

And everyone's just getting injured and no one's talking about it.