“What are you doing?” is a perennial question wherever people are meeting each other. What we are doing for a living seems to be, at least in the Western world, increasingly important for our happiness. However, our relationship with our work can also make us sick. In 1960, novelist Graham Greene coined the term burnout with his tale about a disillusioned architect who withdraws to the jungle to escape his job and the demands of his professional life. Burnout has since been appropriated to name a type of psychological stress that arises in relation to one’s work. Although there is no generally accepted definition of burnout, or binding diagnostic criteria, the most widely-used burnout inventory lists exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy as the distinguishing syndromes of burnout. More and more people are affected by it in recent years and Finn Janning’s unconventional new book “The Happiness of Burnout” provides a novel and insightful perspective on the topic, written as a catchy narrative and thus easily accessible to the non-specialist.

Janning’s book stands out because of its unconventional but forceful potpourri of philosophical, psychological, and literary anecdotes added to an emphatically written case-study of Jeppe Hein, a Danish artist of international acclaim, who was diagnosed with burnout at the age of 35. Janning’s focus and grand ambition is to draw a broader lesson from a Hein’s path to recovery. Beyond, say, a mere enumeration of syndromes or recommendations of efficacious therapies, Janning intends the book to serve as an inspiration for people’s “quest toward a happy and flourishing life” (7).

In the philosophical key message of the book, Janning’s urges the reader to recognise that burnout is tied to one’s outlook on life. Realising that there are no absolute values and no non-negotiable demands in life, that there is, instead, the need to determine one’s values, is key; both in overcoming burnout and in leading a flourishing life. The challenges discussed, as well as Hein’s ways of overcoming them, should be of pedagogical value to many, not only to those who are directly affected by burnout.

Janning draws on “more than 100 hours of interviews with Hein” (5) to describe, analyse and assess his dealing with burnout and the lessons that can be drawn from it, spanning from the time of Hein’s diagnosis in 2009 to his exhibition A Smile for You in 2013. Janning’s illuminates Hein’s case with figurative anecdotes. For example, he describes the breakdown-inducing industriousness that preceded Hein’s diagnosis, and later contrasts it with the unbent impression that Hein made at an exhibition four years after. The first direct quote from Hein sets the tone for the book: “burnout is the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it has also been one of the most beautiful things” (8). Throughout the book, Janning feels out this odd statement. Among the many side-notes of the book, for example how burnout affected Hein’s artwork, there are two main points, one psychological and one philosophical.

First, Janning presents a Janus-faced psychology of burnout. On the one hand, burnout is the end; suffering from it is feeling “indifference, apathy, nothing” (92) – Janning’s comes close to associate burnout with depression. Reaching such a state of inertia, Janning’s writes, relates to how one thinks, feels, and acts; being unable to close the gap between expectation and reward. Burnout arises because one is “living every day as an emergency, as if one’s career or life is at stake, or as a final deadline” (80).  Two psychological dispositions are the root-causes of burnout, according to Janning. First, being prone to set exceedingly high standards and, second, to seek external gratification above anything else. This assessment is verified in Hein: he expected too much of himself and he was doing it to be loved, although he was “apparently doing what he really loved – being creative” (47). On the other hand, burnout is a new beginning. “[Burnout is] something healthy – or the first step toward recovery” (50) from an unhealthy lifestyle. This positive assessment, which Janning traces in various psychological treatments of burnout, permeates throughout Janning’s book and lends it a positive, hopeful touch, which is underscored by anecdotes of Hein’s rehabilitation. Discussing the latter allows Janning to illustrate practical methods, such as yoga or meditation, to deal with burnout and he finds his idea of burnout as a recovery mechanism confirmed when he discusses how Hein’s case relates to stress- and anxiety syndromes and the concept of happiness.

Second, Janning’s core philosophical diagnosis of burnout centres on metaphysics. Metaphysics is a philosophical term used to describe the study of what is in the world – over and above the things that we can see and touch. Janning’s psychological assessment of burnout leads him to conclude that it has to do with exceedingly high demands that one cannot cope with any more. His philosophical point is that there are no fixed standards and rules that we can rely upon. This is important, because “burnout is related to how we see the world” (102). In effect, Janning evokes a kind of existentialist picture according to which the flexibility of values enforces the obligation to think and choose for oneself. Thus, overcoming burnout is, according to Janning, fundamentally tied to one’s philosophical outlook and one’s readiness to re-assess one’s values in light of what is good for oneself.

However, the philosophical position that Janning’s alludes to is interesting, and perhaps expedient in the way that Janning applies it to the case of burnout, but nevertheless controversial, because it smacks of relativism in regards to norms and values. It would have been illuminating to learn why Janning thinks that there are no absolute values, yet why some norms, for example, those that help you overcome burnout, appear to be clearly better than others, which implies that there is, after all, some absolute standard that guides our decisions. 

In toto, the book is an empathic and humane approach that educates through its multi-faceted assessment. No specialist knowledge in either philosophy or psychology is required to enjoy the book. If burnout is, as Janning’s suggests, a matter of a mental process, then picking up on the many thoughts, insights, and (scientific as well as literary) sources provided in this book promises to make for a rewarding read and a stimulating guide to changing one’s thinking about burnout. Janning’s writing exhibits curiosity, fascination, and respect for both the phenomenon of burnout and Hein’s way of dealing with it. If you wonder about happiness or burnout, or both, then this book is an excellent way to start your inquiry.

© 2015 Michael Klenk

Michael Klenk, MA Philosophy (UCL), PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.