URL: https://newsletter.activevoicehq.com/p/it-s-not-just-burnout
They’re not alone. It seems like every time I talk to people in design and product orgs lately—in workshops and group programs, in research interviews and 1:1 coaching sessions—I hear something similar from at least one person. They’re exhausted and overwhelmed. They don’t know why they keep crying. They’re snapping at colleagues, or spewing negativity in meetings, or struggling to get out of bed in the mornings.
But when half your field says it’s burned out, it’s disingenuous at best—and malicious at worst—to call for more personal fortitude. Instead, we need to be honest about where all this burnout is really coming from—and what we can, and can’t, do about it.
It’s the extractive forces of unchecked capitalism—forces that are often ignored or invisible in conversations about burnout. But in truth, those harms are the underlying drivers of that burnout—and we need to be talking about them a whole lot more.
The first one is moral injury: the damage that comes from participating in—or failing to stop—behaviors that violate our values or ethics. It’s the pain borne of having a conscience, but not acting on it.
Then, there’s purposelessness. This sets in when designers and other UXers feel disconnected from the reasons they got into the field in the first place. For some, it was to create something useful in the world—to make people’s lives better or easier.
In fact, research says that “making progress on meaningful work” is the single most important factor in how we feel on the job. And when purpose disappears, people often experience what I think of as a type of ambiguous loss—a form of grief that can be disorienting, because it lacks closure or certainty. On the surface, nothing has changed: You have the same title. You’re still doing the same kind of tasks.
You have to pick some way to change your work life so that it feels a little less meaningless, a little less fraught, a little less injurious to your sense of right and wrong.
But there’s one more factor I want to talk about—one that exacerbates moral injury and purposelessness, and makes freeing yourself from anything a whole lot harder: overidentification with work.
There’s no secret path forward that enables you to face the polycrisis without overwhelm; to find meaning in your work without it taking over your life; to always find ways to use your talents that are both good for the world and your retirement account.
But I can promise this: You can find your agency. You can uncover real choices. Not always the ones you wish you had, but choices nonetheless. The sooner you take an honest look at what’s really draining you at work, the sooner you can start making them. And the sooner you’ll remember how powerful you still are.