Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine:
People who are suffering from burnout tend to describe the sensation in metaphors of emptiness—they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, a drained battery that can no longer hold its charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, a professor at Columbia Teachers College and trained psychotherapist, realized he was feeling this way. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted with the symptoms. He was a burnout researcher himself.
Being burned out on burnout—now that was rich. Madame Curie died of radiation poisoning; Joseph Mitchell famously developed a 32-year-long case of writer’s block after writing a two-part New Yorker series about a blocked writer; now Farber was suffering the same self-referential fate. He jokes about it today (who wouldn’t?) but hardly felt sanguine as it was happening (who would?). Colleagues tried to persuade him to stick it out. “But for the most part, I’ve resisted coming back,” says Farber. “I’ve never been able to find that same sense of satisfaction.”
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