I saw this sentence and my amygdala went into overdrive...

> The burnout is your brain telling you that whatever it is you're currently doing isn't a sustainable solution for happiness.

... and now it went to an idle state again.

Well, yeah. Although sometimes just by not being in the same position - completely different social structure even if the job description is identical - can be enough to address the underlying problem. If the problem is something intrinsic to the job then you are right, changing companies won't help at all.

This resonates with the published research on Burnout (mostly Maslach): she argues that the causes of burnout are best understood as mismatch between expectations and workplace reality. E.g. customer support firefighting can be tolerable if you don't expect yourself to be spending time on strategic thinkiing.

However, when burnout has happened, change of perspective / removing causes just won't do (those are preventative solutions). When you've burnt out, it's time for rest.

In a state of severe motivational crisis (true burnout, not the yuppie-flu decline-of-interest that is often given this name), people aren't thinking clearly and are not equipped to do that. At that point, you're in survival mode and you're barely passing at that. Fencing with existential dragons is not going to help.

People burn out for a variety of reasons but--again, if we're talking about true burnout--the cause is usually not just stress but distress: a subtype of stress that is relentless, purposeless, acutely dysphoric, and often imposed by external forces. The problem is that sometimes those external forces are wholly imagined (delusions and hypervigilance brought on by nervous exhaustion) and sometimes they are real and malevolent (such as in the case of the need to work to survive, which is imposed on us by an upper class we lack the organizational capability to remove from power and eliminate) and the burning-out person is never well-equipped to sort out which is the case.

That's one hell of a parenthetical.

Therapist: Have you considered breathing exercises?

cs137: Yes, but I've found that the only long-term solution is to truck the managerial class to the killing fields.

I'm not saying you're wrong, mind.

They've left the world worse off than it was 50 years ago, and they're destroying the planet--and all for nothing, too. The corporate system has to be scrapped before it's too late.