Jonathan Malesic

Who are our customers, clients, and so on?

And when those things get out of alignment, then you kind of stretch between them.

You're trying to stretch across this gap.

And that feeling of trying to stretch across that gap is burnout.

Our metaphor for burnout is burning, like you have a tank of fuel and you burn through it.

The experience is really more like stretching, I think, because you're trying to fill this gap with a self that's not quite big enough to do it.

Burned out from exhaustion.

And in ambulance blues, Neil Young also uses the term burnout.

Burnout.

That song was recorded, I think, also in 1974, at the exact same time that the first papers on burnout were appearing in psychological journals.

When a staff member in an alternative institution burns out for whatever reasons and becomes inoperative to all intents and purposes, the burnout manifests itself in many different symptomatic ways.

Burnout was just kind of like in the air.

I think they're just catching the same vibe.

They're just, you know, finding it on different frequencies.

The years after World War II in particular, unions had a lot of power.

The American economy was very strong across many, many sectors.

And this kind of implicit social contract is like, your wages are going to keep increasing.

Your hours even may keep decreasing.

Conditions are going to keep getting better.

So long as you don't go on strike, as long as you don't cause trouble, basically.