I'm recovering from achievement burnout.
A structural problem with a very personal cost
The word “burnout” gets thrown around a lot in academic circles because largely, as a class of employed laborers, scholar-teachers are often overworked and underpaid, which are two interlocking conditions that provide key ingredients for working beyond our capacity.
We teach multiple classes, submit grant proposals, conduct research, write journal articles and books, serve on numerous committees, perform peer reviews, mentor colleagues and students, program events, give interviews to journalists (and students in journalism classes), and write op-eds.
Until recently, I assumed burnout primarily came from attempting to juggle all-the-things at once and feeling unable, due to the unforgiving structures of our workplaces, to let anything fall. We sacrifice sleep, wellness, rest, hobbies, and relationships because we are so afraid one of those balls will drop.
This narrow definition of burnout—one tied to managing the often unrealistic workload of academic jobs and sacrificing all well-being in the process—was the only one I thought I had to avoid as a faculty member. I delved into productivity advice and devised systems and strategies to help me manage my work life as best I could given the structural constraints of the job. And I felt like I was managing the workload required to obtain tenure without losing my soul in the process.
That’s not the type of burnout I want to discuss today, though workload burnout and what I’m calling achievement burnout are not as distinct as they might first appear. Both are variations on the same underlying issue: a system that extracts labor under conditions it controls while leaving workers to bear the costs of that extraction. I had developed strategies that helped me manage the immediate workload, but individual strategies are not structural solutions, and the system has a way of shifting capriciously.
What I want to think through here is the specific form burnout takes when the problem isn’t the volume of work but the futility of the achievement imperative itself.
Achievement burnout, as I’m defining it, is what happens when the reward system appears to be functioning—publications get published, fellowships get won, CVs get longer—but the finish line remains hazy in the distance no matter how hard you run towards it. The runner who finally stops collapses not so much from exhaustion but from the realization that the race will likely never end.
As many of my dear readers know, I was on the job market for several years starting early in my tenure-track position because my partner and I didn’t want to live in Texas forever. It is common knowledge in academia that if you want a shot at any sort of mobility in an ever-shrinking job market, then you must be a highly productive scholar, have strong network ties, win grants or fellowships, and be a darn-good teacher in the process.
So, if you want to be able to live closer to family, in a blue state, or in a large city, then your opportunities are tied to your output. And, like most things in academia, there’s no precise standard you have to meet to be able to achieve this, and much of the time it comes down to being in the right place at the right time with the right connections on the job market. The lack of gainful employment in academia has created this hamster wheel.
Because I loved my job as a scholar-teacher, I ran and ran on that wheel. I was constantly searching for ways to raise my profile, connect with the “right” networks, and produce high-quality work in prestigious places. I knew intimately how the system worked and that there were no guarantees that even if I did everything in my power, I would be able to secure a good job in a location I wanted to be. The great irony was I already had my academic dream job, but my broader life was suffering because the state of Texas wasn’t my place and the job itself was starting to buckle under the conservative takeover of the education system.
At the same time, the markers I used to gauge my well-being were all holding: free evenings, jiu-jitsu, time with my partner, and weekends that belonged to me. I never thought I was burnt out because I hadn’t sacrificed these parts of my life for work.
In my last couple of years as a faculty member, my mental state started to shift. Tasks that I used to enjoy, like the research process itself, started bringing me less joy. I was able to go through the motions and even published during that period, but it became harder and harder for me to enjoy the process. I still applied for fellowships and awards, but I started developing resistance and resentment towards the process.
The relentlessness of that one singular pursuit had begun to hollow me out: raise your profile, achieve more, and never actually know if the finish line is after a 400-meter sprint, at the end of an ultramarathon, or just a mirage in the desert.
It wasn’t ever that I felt my workload itself was too much; it was that the mental labor of relentlessly focusing on achievement metrics had quietly stolen from parts of the work I had loved most. A degree of compromise is often required for any goal, but I allowed my internal fire to burn out in the process.
Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter argue that burnout arises not from personal failing but from chronic mismatches between people and the structures in which they work—and that self-care, however well-intentioned, cannot fix a structural problem. The mismatches they identify span six areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.
The mismatches that keep pinging in my mind are control and reward. Maslach and Leiter write that the
lack of control over when, where, and how to work frustrates people’s sense of autonomy and competence… while a reward mismatch means that good work is not receiving appropriate recognition or opportunities.
Lack of control and opportunity combine to make achievement in academia simultaneously voluntary and coerced—and that combination is where the mismatch becomes corrosive. No one may explicitly require the next publication, keynote, award, or collaboration, but the uncertainty of the market makes each one feel compulsory:
You control whether you write the article, but not whether reviewers accept it.
You can control the number of hours you spend on the grant application, but not whether it’s awarded.
You control whether you apply, but not whether a search committee values your profile.
You can control whether you pursue a faculty job in the first place, but you cannot control whether you land a job located someplace you want to live.
This is what Maslach and Leiter mean when they argue that burnout is an organizational problem, not a personal one. The system produces the conditions; the individual absorbs the cost.
I know this truth not as an abstraction but as a lived condition. It's been two years since I left my faculty role, and I haven't recovered from achievement burnout yet.
What writing coaching has given me, quietly and unexpectedly, is work whose value I can feel immediately — not deferred to a reviewer's decision or a search committee's judgment, but present in the room.
I can watch a client's shoulders drop as something clicks into place, see the moment confusion becomes clarity, and feel the session change temperature. No rubric captures that. No CV line contains it. At the same time, I see how this steady work leads to them achieving thier goals and I relish in the sense of accomplishment they feel when they do.
But other aspects of my job don’t afford this same respite. My business coach recently suggested a simple homework task of trying to figure out which PNP posts resonated most with my coaching clients: “Make sure you are connecting with the people you want to serve. Look at your metrics and see how your posts are performing.” Immediately, my brain thought of Google Scholar metrics and citation and view counts, and I felt the desire to fight that task to the death to avoid doing it. When you have been burned, you develop a self-defense mechanism to avoid the heat again.
This is a really strange experience for me when you look at my four plus decades on this planet. Prior to academia, I had always been a person who likes to set goals, figure out the best path towards that goal, and complete it.
In each era of my life, I’ve had something to strive for. Now, I’ve been quietly worried that I will never see that version of myself again. What if she’s lost forever?
Le sigh… No, I don’t actually believe that this version of Jenn is gone forevermore. The drive isn't gone so much as it has gone underground, the way certain plants do in winter—not dead, just doing something necessary and invisible that the surface can't yet show.
At this point, dear reader, I would normally give you a positive reframe, a lesson learned, or a mindset that you can take away that will make your path a little less perilous than mine has been. I imagine that post will be here one day soon.
But in this case, I’m still navigating my rocky path. I'm in the messy middle of recovery, where I've only just realized—like, literally in the couple weeks—that I, too, burned out of academia.
And maybe that’s where I need to leave it for now: not with a tidy resolution, but with the thing I always tell my coaching clients is the hardest and most necessary part of any difficult stretch of work on the mind. I've named it, and naming it lessens its hold on me.
That’s where everything else begins.
