A new kind of exhaustion has been moving through consulting rooms, offices, and end-of-day conversations. It does not present itself as laziness, disorganization, or lack of discipline. It arrives fluent in corporate language, with a packed calendar, updated spreadsheets, synchronized apps, and a persistent guilt over not being productive enough. The person works, replies, anticipates, compensates, revises, smiles through meetings, accepts the return to the office, performs autonomy under conditions of control, and calls “a busy period” what has already become a way of life. The contemporary drama of work begins when excess stops looking like an exception and starts functioning as a moral condition of belonging.
The data help move this impression out of the realm of anecdote. In 2026, the International Labour Organization estimated that more than 840,000 deaths each year are linked to psychosocial risks at work, including long working hours, job insecurity, and harassment. The same line of research by the ILO and the WHO had already shown that working 55 hours or more per week was associated with 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016, a 29% increase compared with 2000. In Brazil, Social Security reported that, in 2025, 546,254 temporary disability benefits were granted for mental and behavioral disorders, a 15.66% increase over 2024, when the number had reached 472,328. Women accounted for 63.46% of these leaves, and São Paulo recorded the highest absolute number, with 149,375 benefits granted. This is not an imaginary epidemic produced by people who have simply become too sensitive. A measurable form of suffering is moving through the world of work.
Calling this set of symptoms burnout can be useful, as long as the term does not bring the investigation to a premature close. The WHO includes burnout in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon linked to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, marked by exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism toward one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. The WHO itself emphasizes that burnout is not a medical condition in its own right. The distinction matters because, when burnout becomes merely an individual diagnosis, the organization of work leaves the scene untouched. The person falls ill, receives a name for their collapse, steps away when they can no longer go on, turns to medication when the body can no longer sustain the routine, and hears recommendations for self-care produced by the very logic that exhausted them. The machine remains intact, now accompanied by wellness programs, mental health handbooks, and uplifting sentences on LinkedIn.
Christophe Dejours offers a more demanding way into the problem. In Living Work II: Work and Emancipation, he insists on a distinction the corporate world pretends to understand while neutralizing it every day: the distance between prescribed work and actual work. The organization prescribes tasks, workflows, goals, org charts, protocols, and metrics. The worker encounters the real: what fails, slips away, slows down, resists, and demands judgment, tact, improvisation, cooperation, and practical intelligence. Actual work never fully coincides with the work imagined by management. There is always a gap. And it is precisely in that gap that the worker thinks, invents, suffers, negotiates, and puts something of themselves into the task. Living work is not the obedient execution of an instruction. It is intelligence mobilized in the face of everything the instruction failed to foresee.
Seen through this lens, suffering at work is no longer a simple effect of excess. The problem is not only working too much, but working under the demand to erase the very reality of the work being done. The unexpected must be handled without leaving a trace. Cooperation is required, but evaluation remains individual. Improvisation keeps the process alive, but has to appear as obedience to procedure. Singular intelligence is summoned, as long as it produces standardized, comparable, and auditable results. Subjectivity matters when it increases productivity; when it asks for recognition, it becomes noise.
Dejours distinguishes coordination from cooperation. Coordination belongs to the prescribed level of work: it distributes roles, defines tasks, and organizes responsibilities. Cooperation belongs to actual work: it requires trust, visibility around the act of doing, mutual recognition, and collective deliberation about the real conditions of the activity. This distinction is crucial for understanding the present. Many companies speak the language of collaboration while merely refining mechanisms of coordination. They multiply meetings, platforms, check-ins, OKRs, dashboards, and rituals of alignment. The result can be a choreography of participation without genuine cooperation. Everyone shows up, everyone has an opinion, everyone reacts with the appropriate emoji, but very little of the real work finds a place where it can be thought through together.
The pandemic deepened this fracture. For months, sometimes years, home became the office, the dining table became a workstation, the bedroom became a meeting room, and the phone secured its place as a small luminous leash. Remote work brought real relief to many people: less commuting, more autonomy, less exposure to certain forms of violence built into the physical workplace. At the same time, it dissolved already fragile boundaries. The workday began to leak into the evening, the weekend, the bed, lunch, and the break that no longer existed. The return to the office, in turn, did not always rebuild the collective. In many cases, it simply brought bodies back into the workplace without restoring the trust that would make working together possible.
The debate over returning to the office is less straightforward than it seems. According to the Pew Research Center, among U.S. workers whose jobs can be done from home and who work remotely at least part of the time, 46% said they would be unlikely to stay in their job if remote work were eliminated. Among those who are not fully remote, 75% said their employers now require them to be in the workplace a certain number of days, up from 63% in early 2023. The data do not prove that remote work is better than in-person work. They point to something else: flexibility has stopped being a fringe benefit and moved to the center of the psychological contract between workers and organizations.
The problem, then, is not to choose a crude side between home and office. Some in-person workplaces are alive, cooperative, and fertile. Some remote arrangements are miserable, lonely, monitored by software, and corroded by endless availability. The decisive point is the quality of the working bond. When an organization loses the ability to produce trust, it tries to compensate with presence, control, and measurement. It orders people back to the office in the name of “strengthening culture,” when what it may really want is to recover the visibility of bodies. It mistakes coexistence for occupying the same space. It mistakes management for surveillance. It mistakes leadership for monitoring the chair.
Artificial intelligence enters this scene as both promise and threat. Treating it only as a villain would be too easy. It can reduce repetitive tasks, expand access to resources, speed up research, support writing, organize information, and free up time for work of greater density. The problem lies in the fantasy that has attached itself to it: the idea that everything can now be solved faster because a machine is available. McKinsey reported in 2025 that 88% of the organizations surveyed were already using AI in at least one business function, while 62% were experimenting with AI agents. Microsoft, in a 2025 report, drew on data from 31,000 workers in 31 countries, LinkedIn trends, and Microsoft 365 productivity signals to describe the rise of companies organized around hybrid teams of humans and agents. The promise is efficiency. The risk is that every technical gain becomes a new psychic obligation.
Technology rarely eliminates pressure; more often, it raises the bar. If a task once took two days, it is now expected to take two hours. If taking time to reply was once acceptable, instant response has become a sign of competence. If AI can draft, summarize, calculate, compare, and suggest, why are you still behind? The question sounds pragmatic, but beneath it lies a moral brutality. The worker is no longer competing only with colleagues. They are competing with an imaginary version of themselves, boosted by tools, constantly updated, permanently available, always able to deliver more. Failure stops being technical and becomes a personal flaw.
Microsoft has called this scenario the “infinite workday.” In 2025, one in three employees surveyed by the company said that the pace of work over the previous five years had made it impossible to keep up with demands. The phrase is precise because it shifts the question away from the formal length of the workday and toward the psychic experience of time. Infinite work is not only work that ends late. It is work that does not end inside the mind. It keeps vibrating after the computer is closed. It returns in the shower. It invades Sunday. It turns rest into accumulated delay.
Byung-Chul Han helps us understand the moral mutation of this machinery. The performance society does not need only authoritarian bosses; it produces subjects who exploit themselves while believing they are fulfilling their potential. The old discipline commanded from the outside. Contemporary performance seduces from within. The subject demands more from themselves, optimizes, compares, blames themselves, and turns their own exhaustion into an enterprise. Corporate language has learned to soften this violence with comforting words: ownership, autonomy, resilience, high performance, being “in charge of one’s journey.” Many of these words carry a legitimate promise. Used without criticism, they become an elegant varnish for transferring the psychic cost of a poorly designed organization onto the individual.
Hartmut Rosa adds another element: acceleration breaks the possibility of resonance. The world moves too fast to be truly appropriated. At work, this appears as a succession of tasks without experience. Meetings without elaboration. Deliverables without sedimentation. Feedback without listening. Changes without mourning. Projects born already obsolete. The worker takes part in everything and recognizes themselves in almost nothing. Professional life fills with motion and loses density. The calendar is full; the experience is empty.
Here Dejours returns with particular force. For him, recognition at work plays a decisive role in psychic health. Salary is not enough, although salary matters, and matters greatly. A person needs some part of their contribution to be recognized by others. Dejours speaks of judgments of usefulness and judgments of beauty: the first recognizes that the work serves a purpose, has value, produces something; the second recognizes the quality of the gesture, the elegance of the know-how, the singularity of a way of working. Without this social theater of recognition, sublimation becomes impoverished. The worker gives energy, intelligence, and desire, but receives only demands, metrics, or silence.
The crisis of leadership passes through this distinction. A title is not authority. A title comes from above, signed by the org chart, the contract, and internal policy. Authority, as Dejours observes, depends on recognition. It emerges when someone’s competence becomes visible to others: in sharper judgment, accumulated experience, and the ability to sustain difficult decisions without turning the collective into an obedient audience. The manager with a title gives orders because they can. Legitimate authority guides because others recognize in it a force of work, not merely a position of power. The contemporary symptom is clear: too much command, too little authority.
This point is politically delicate because it touches a poorly digested democratic illusion. Equality of dignity does not erase differences in experience, competence, and judgment. Collective work has to deal with asymmetries without turning them into abuse. When every difference becomes a threat, authority becomes unspeakable. When every hierarchy shields itself from criticism, authority rots into authoritarianism. Cooperation requires a more difficult third path: recognizing competence without humiliating, distributing responsibility without infantilizing, exercising leadership without turning the other person into a replaceable part.
In Brazil, this debate has acquired an immediate institutional consequence. The new wording of NR-1, postponed by MTE Ordinance No. 765 and set to take effect on May 25, 2026, includes psychosocial risk factors in Occupational Risk Management. The Ministry of Labor and Employment itself has stated that these factors must be included in the occupational risk inventory, alongside physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic, and accident-related risks. The change matters because it moves mental health away from the field of corporate goodwill and into the field of organizational responsibility. The risk is that it becomes another checklist. The advance will only be real if the regulation opens space for asking how work is being organized, distributed, commanded, evaluated, and recognized.
The worst possible use of this agenda would be to create a mental health bureaucracy that leaves the machinery of illness untouched. Companies may measure workplace climate, hire speakers, offer meditation apps, distribute anti-harassment handbooks, and still preserve the same culture of fear, artificial urgency, contradictory goals, and incompetent leadership. Psychic care at work is not measured only by the existence of benefits. It is measured by the concrete possibility of telling the truth about work without being punished for it. It is measured by the existence of spaces where the act of working can be collectively discussed. It is measured by the way an organization deals with conflict, error, limits, rest, and disagreement.
The decisive question, then, is not whether people have become too fragile for contemporary work. That formulation is already contaminated. The better question is: what kind of work are we building when so many people have to fall ill in order to prove they have reached their limit? There is a silent obscenity in recognizing suffering only when it becomes formal incapacity, a medical leave, a diagnosable crisis, or a visible collapse. Before that, the person simply “failed to adapt,” “didn’t know how to prioritize,” “lacked emotional intelligence,” or “couldn’t keep up with the pace.” Administrative language is expert at turning organizational violence into individual insufficiency.
Work is not, by nature, an enemy of life. It can organize time, transmit crafts and skills, create belonging, expand intelligence, and offer a person a concrete way of taking part in the world. Illness begins when this living dimension is replaced by execution, surveillance, and abstract performance. Where cooperation breaks down, trust becomes vulnerability, recognition disappears, and authority is reduced to a title, work loses its human thickness. It keeps functioning, often with profit, awards, and wellness seals. But it no longer sustains a common world. It merely operates.
Today’s exhaustion does not come only from lack of rest. It also comes from the loss of a scene in which effort can make sense. Without recognition, even productivity turns into noise: much is delivered, but almost nothing is worked through. The point is not to defend work as a moral value, nor to dismiss it as pure exploitation. It is to ask what kind of bond work can still produce. When work ignores the real, it makes those who sustain it ill. When it eliminates conflict, it produces cynicism. When it fails to create trust, it manufactures surveillance. When it demands subjectivity and refuses recognition, it consumes the living intelligence on which it depends.
The problem is no longer simply how to manage time better. It is realizing that life itself has been reorganized around the demands of work. The workday has invaded the body, the home, sleep, and the spaces in between; now it promises to accelerate further with machines that were supposed to spare us. To speak seriously about illness means abandoning the comfortable superstition that teaching the individual to breathe better would be enough. In certain environments, breathing better only prolongs one’s stay inside the unbreathable. The ethical question begins where the vocabulary of self-care runs out: who profits from this lack of air?
References
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