While it’s natural for the meaning of words to shift over time, it’s startling to see a condition that seemingly defined a generation be reappropriated so quickly. So how did a term that tormented millions and courted the attention of the World Health Organization come to meanFor Hannah M, it appears to be a case of unconscious conditioning.
Like many things, this distortion is amplified by social media. For Hannah O, that’s particularly true in how we now form our ideas of “normal”. No matter who you are, first jobs are tough. In the past, we managed those tensions by catching up with friends and griping about our boss or workload. These comparisons allowed us to gauge if we were being treated fairly and thus build reasonable expectations of work.
Now, much of that analysis happens by following glossy strangers online and grabbing sanitised glimpses of their “real lives”. “You can see another person’s whole nine-to-five or day-in-my-life in 60 seconds and make judgments through that,” explains Hannah O. “[People] just think, ‘Oh, well, I’m doing so much more than them, my work is much higher pressure.’”
Compounding this disconnection is the trick that, once you engage with any of this content, near-psychic algorithms ensure that it continues to flood your feed and brain – resulting in a kind of confirmation bias. “You interact with one piece of content that talks about burnout or signs of burnout, and you’re fed more and more and more. Then the signs [start to feel] ubiquitous,” cautions Hannah M.