In the end, matriarchy isn’t the fear. Rather, it’s the idea that women will define their own value, and their own futures, on their own terms instea… - Anne Helen Petersen

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

We can understand that if companies actually want to cultivate that ever-alluring “good” company culture, they have to rethink not just the amenities and office space they’re providing their employees but the entire style of work, the whole ethos of optimization and presentism. Doing so will demand authentically embracing flexibility, as we discussed in the last chapter. But it will also mean reconsidering core values beyond “growth” and “scale,” and understanding that you cannot compel or surveil your way to sustained, quality productivity. Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met.

Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined.