Burnout isn't a single condition. Emotional exhaustion needs a break (vacation). A lack of self-efficacy requires skill development (upskilling). Cynicism, the hardest to fix, demands rediscovering your 'why' (inspiration). Misdiagnosing the cause leads to ineffective solutions.

The solution to systemic workplace exploitation and burnout is not individual self-help strategies. Author Sarah Jaffe argues that meaningful change in working conditions, hours, and pay has historically been achieved only through collective action, organization, and solidarity, where workers demand better terms together.

The narrative that personal problems require therapy pathologizes what are often systemic economic issues. You cannot "therapy your way out of material precarity." Structural solutions like higher wages, affordable housing, and a stronger social safety net are often more effective mental health policies than individual introspection.

The education crisis isn't a lack of qualified people, but a lack of jobs with adequate compensation, respect, and support to retain them. It's a problem of professional unsustainability driven by systemic issues, not a scarcity of talent.

Connective labor can be sustaining, not draining. Burnout occurs when the "social architecture" lacks support systems like "sounding boards" for practitioners to process their work. The problem isn't the emotional work itself, but the conditions under which it's performed.

The teaching profession has become a "catch-all" for broader societal failures. Educators are now burdened with non-teaching duties like counseling, discipline, and feeding food-insecure students, making their primary role as educators unsustainable.

The free market is ruthlessly efficient at pushing commodity service providers to a point of burnout, where they give maximum effort for minimum sustainable pay. To escape burnout, you must escape commoditization by creating a unique, high-value offer.

Before labeling a team as not resilient, leaders should first examine their own expectations. Often, what appears as a lack of resilience is a natural reaction to systemic issues like overwork, underpayment, and inadequate support, making it a leadership problem, not an employee one.

Data scientist Penelope Lafeuille's burnout wasn't solely from long hours, but from a major disconnect between her daily work in finance and her long-term career goal in life sciences. This misalignment created a lack of purpose that overwork simply exacerbated, prompting a career change as the true solution.