What is Burnout?
Burnout is a phenomenon that has caught the attention of researchers and the media alike. Burnout is a state of chronic stress that leads to; physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
This can impact your ability to function on a personal and/or professional level. It has an insidious, slow burning nature which wears down the individual over time.
The Guardian reports the number of people suffering from work related stresses at half a million. You only need to read the comments in this article to know that there are people really suffering out there.
And Millennial Burnout…
Millennials have been described as the Burnout Generation, with research seeming to suggest that Millennials could be impacted more by burnout than other generations. Perhaps this explains why job hopping has more than doubled in the last 20 years?
The Main Causes Of Burnout
For many people, work has become a never ending and unattainable cycle of achievement. The speed of the rat race has increased and the hamster wheel is spinning at an even faster rate. The main culprits of this have been identified to include:
- Longer work hours
- Rising workloads and job demands
- Organisational politics
- Menial tasks that interfere with work duties
- Role ambiguity / conflict
- Feeling fairly rewarded
- Job security
You’re Fired!
Regarding the last point on the above list, I’ve seen many people denied permanent contracts and even made redundant after months/years and even decades of of hard work. In fact since 2009 1 in 7 British employees have lost their jobs. By contrast what I do see is that people who leave their current companies for other jobs are rewarded with healthy pay rises.
Pay Growth Or Rather A Lack Off
This isn’t just my experience, pay growth has been shown to increase by 11% for job switchers compared to 2.5% for people staying in the same role over 12 months. In fact some reports say that changing jobs can increase your salary by 19-27%.
When we look macro-economically we see that pay has not increased in real terms since 2010. If you refer back to our list above, again you will see that being fairly rewarded is yet another correlate of burnout.
Is it fair to speculate that the longer this pay stagnation continues the more we will continue to see burnout rates increase?
Re-Evaluating Your Career
Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought to yourself ‘what on earth am I doing here?’ ‘How is this helping anyone?’ To paraphrase Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia For Realists:
Are you in the type of “bullshit job” where people earn money in “strategic tran-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstore the value-add on co-creation in the network society”?
I agree with the Malcom Gladwell, the author of Outliers, when he says that ‘autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are the the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.’
I feel many jobs on the market are lacking in these qualities now, and this is another reason burnout rates are increasing.
What Is The Solution To Burnout?
In my opinion, there is one thing that can help with burnout, workplace stress and job instability and this is a healthy emergency travel fund. A travel fund allows for a period of renewal, a break from long hours, high demands, menial tasks, and even if you don’t use it, less stress about job stability.
Now, you might think, if I quit my job, I’ll run out of money and be back there pretty soon! However, when taking geographical arbitrage into the consideration, this can increase the relative purchasing power you have.
For example, the cost of living in South-East Asia is much lower so you can make you savings go much further. A few thousand pounds/dollars in the UK or the US might not go far but take it to Vietnam, for example, and you could afford the long-term break you need.
At a glance I found a £13 per room per night hotel in Hanoi. For two people that’s around £200pp per month, a fraction of my monthly rent. Living in places like this would mean it would take some real time to do any serious damage to my cash reserves. How about yours?
Live In A More Economically Viable Place
Instead of having the notion of stability you could have the chance to travel the world and live in many different countries. Perhaps a country with cities that score highly in terms of quality of life, or cities that rank in the top 10 of the worlds most liveable cities.
Even if you don’t fancy country hopping between Vietnam and Thailand, perhaps you could go and live somewhere like Melbourne, Australia for a year? Melbourne was voted for many consecutive years, ‘the world’s most liveable city’. Until being knocked off the top spot by Vienna in 2018.
Obviously this depends on your personal circumstances as not everyone can move themselves/their families half way across the world. However, even just moving from London to Leeds in the UK (2.5 hours by train), can substantially increase your purchasing power due to the lower cost of living.
What About Your Financial Goals?
There may be a potential financial cost, so it’s important to develop a financial buffer. You may also have to neglect your long-term financial goals.
Take my position for example, I have previously referred to my goal to be financially independence as being a marathon and not a sprint. So perhaps it is sensible to take these regular breaks.
Otherwise, you or I may never reach our respective finish lines motivationally or otherwise. Especially if you are very stressed out and close to Burnout.
How About A Pay Rise… In Real Terms?
As above, pay stagnation has been occuring over the last decade, and being fairly rewarded is a influencing factor of burnout. So how about a pay rise, in real terms?
In this example, I will use my life as a case study. Objective measures on NUMBEO suggests that Melbourne, Australia has a slightly higher cost of living that my current city.
According to this site I would need around 25% more per month to live in Melbourne. Playing around with some numbers this would be around £3,360 or rather $6,144 AUD per year more based on my current living costs.
The average salary for my role ‘Data Analyst’ in Melbourne is $91,000 (£50,000). My current salary would equate to around $47,000, giving me a pay rise of $44,000. This would be an pre-tax increase of $3666 per month, or $3,154 per month after factoring in the increased living costs.
Free Accomodation
There are also tax breaks for visitors and a superannuation scheme. More importantly, there are sites such as Trusted Sitters you can use to cut your living costs dramatically.
For the membership fee of £89 per year, you can find house sits and/or pet sits across the world. Sit a house for anything between a couple of days to a couple of months.
Final Thoughts
Corporations across the the world are burning out their employees at an increasing rate. They continue to confuse productivity with time by enforcing an 8 hour+ work day.
All the while, they drive up demand on people’s time by increasing their work demand. At the same time, providing employee’s with less stability and satisfaction with their work.
The result is more people feeling more stressed or burnt out and feeling that their time is more scarce than ever. With this happening on a more frequent basis you never know when you might become one of the many people suffering from workplace stress.
Lobbying Your Employer
Organisations need to utilise automation and technology, giving back time to employees and cutting their hours. I am a big fan of the four day work week. Hopefully, this is something that will become more common over time, with many organisations already switching to a 4 day week.
If you have any employee surveys or forums keep drawing their attention to this. Businesses are competitive by nature, so if one company does it they won’t want to lose their talent to other firms offering this perk.
It is estimated that in the in the US stress related absences cost a company an average $602 per employee per year, with 60% of absences being traced back to stress. In terms of the US economy alone this translates to a loss of between $150 to $300 billion annually so imagine what the global cost is.
Therefore, businesses would have to be stupid not to take your well-being seriously, by encouraging a better work-life balance.
Take A Well-Earned Break
It is not always possible to find and organisation which takes well-being seriously. Therefore, having a serious emergency travel fund can offer a way out of difficult times, even if it is just a temporary one.
In a previous article I have written about how buying experiences can make you happier. Therefore this may help with stress and even if you are lacking in optimism making this jump may help.
A major cash buffer can allow you to escape as far as a different country or continent to renew your energy. You never know, this freedom of time and location may allow you to persue your interests and ultimately make more money. Regardless of this, time is money!
Your Experiences & Thoughts
As I have said, many people have experienced some form of high stress and even burn out. If you are one of these people, please feel free to get in touch with me, either directly or share your thoughts in the comments section. Perhaps you can help other people?
If you want to save more money I have written a few articles previously that may help with this. These are below:
- How To Save Money For Travel Experiences
- Genuine Ways To Save Without Suffering!
- How To Increase Your Willpower To Save Money, Invest And Pay Off Debt
What is Burnout?
Burnout is a phenomenon that has caught the attention of researchers and the media alike. Burnout is a state of chronic stress that leads to; physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
This can impact your ability to function on a personal and/or professional level. It has an insidious, slow burning nature which wears down the individual over time.
The Guardian reports the number of people suffering from work related stresses at half a million. You only need to read the comments in this article to know that there are people really suffering out there.
And Millennial Burnout…
Millennials have been described as the Burnout Generation, with research seeming to suggest that Millennials could be impacted more by burnout than other generations. Perhaps this explains why job hopping has more than doubled in the last 20 years?
The Main Causes Of Burnout
For many people, work has become a never ending and unattainable cycle of achievement. The speed of the rat race has increased and the hamster wheel is spinning at an even faster rate. The main culprits of this have been identified to include:
- Longer work hours
- Rising workloads and job demands
- Organisational politics
- Menial tasks that interfere with work duties
- Role ambiguity / conflict
- Feeling fairly rewarded
- Job security
You’re Fired!
Regarding the last point on the above list, I’ve seen many people denied permanent contracts and even made redundant after months/years and even decades of of hard work. In fact since 2009 1 in 7 British employees have lost their jobs. By contrast what I do see is that people who leave their current companies for other jobs are rewarded with healthy pay rises.
Pay Growth Or Rather A Lack Off
This isn’t just my experience, pay growth has been shown to increase by 11% for job switchers compared to 2.5% for people staying in the same role over 12 months. In fact some reports say that changing jobs can increase your salary by 19-27%.
When we look macro-economically we see that pay has not increased in real terms since 2010. If you refer back to our list above, again you will see that being fairly rewarded is yet another correlate of burnout.
Is it fair to speculate that the longer this pay stagnation continues the more we will continue to see burnout rates increase?
Re-Evaluating Your Career
Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought to yourself ‘what on earth am I doing here?’ ‘How is this helping anyone?’ To paraphrase Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia For Realists:
Are you in the type of “bullshit job” where people earn money in “strategic tran-sector peer-to-peer meetings to brainstore the value-add on co-creation in the network society”?
I agree with the Malcom Gladwell, the author of Outliers, when he says that ‘autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are the the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.’
I feel many jobs on the market are lacking in these qualities now, and this is another reason burnout rates are increasing.
What Is The Solution To Burnout?
In my opinion, there is one thing that can help with burnout, workplace stress and job instability and this is a healthy emergency travel fund. A travel fund allows for a period of renewal, a break from long hours, high demands, menial tasks, and even if you don’t use it, less stress about job stability.
Now, you might think, if I quit my job, I’ll run out of money and be back there pretty soon! However, when taking geographical arbitrage into the consideration, this can increase the relative purchasing power you have. For example, the cost of living in South-East Asia is much lower so you can make you savings go much further. A few thousand pounds/dollars in the UK or the US might not go far but take it to Vietnam, for example, and you could afford the long-term break you need.
At a glance I found a £13 per room per night hotel in Hanoi. For two people that’s around £200pp per month, a fraction of my monthly rent. Living in places like this would mean it would take some real time to do any serious damage to my cash reserves. How about yours?
Trading Stability For Livability
Instead of having the notion of stability you could have the chance to travel the world and live in many different countries. Perhaps a country with cities that score highly in terms of quality of life, or cities that rank in the top 10 of the worlds most liveable cities.
Even if you don’t fancy country hopping between Vietnam and Thailand, perhaps you could go and live somewhere like Melbourne, Australia for a year?
Melbourne was voted for many consecutive years, ‘the world’s most liveable city’. Until being knocked off the top spot by Vienna in 2018.
Obviously this depends on your personal circumstances as not everyone can move themselves/their families half way across the world. But it’s a real option for many that maybe don’t realise it is.
What About Your Financial Goals?
There may be a potential financial cost, so it’s important to develop a financial buffer. You may also have to neglect your long-term financial goals.
Take my position for example, I have previously referred to my goal to be financially independence as being a marathon and not a sprint. So perhaps it is sensible to take these regular breaks.
Otherwise, you or I may never reach our respective finish lines motivationally or otherwise. Especially if you are very stressed out and close to Burnout.
How About A Pay Rise… In Real Terms?
As above, pay stagnation has been occuring over the last decade, and being fairly rewarded is a influencing factor of burnout. So how about a pay rise, in real terms?
In this example, I will use my life as a case study. Objective measures on NUMBEO suggests that Melbourne, Australia has a slightly higher cost of living that my current city.
According to this site I would need around 25% more per month to live in Melbourne. Playing around with some numbers this would be around £3,360 or rather $6,144 AUD per year more based on my current living costs.
The average salary for my role ‘Data Analyst’ in Melbourne is $91,000 (£50,000). My current salary would equate to around $47,000, giving me a pay rise of $44,000. This would be an pre-tax increase of $3666 per month, or $3,154 per month after factoring in the increased living costs.
Free Accomodation
There are also tax breaks for visitors and a superannuation scheme. More importantly, there are sites such as Trusted Sitters you can use to cut your living costs dramatically.
For the membership fee of £89 per year, you can find house sits and/or pet sits across the world. Sit a house for anything between a couple of days to a couple of months.
Final Thoughts
Corporations across the the world are burning out their employees at an increasing rate. They continue to confuse productivity with time by enforcing an 8 hour+ work day.
All the while, they drive up demand on people’s time by increasing their work demand. At the same time, providing employee’s with less stability and satisfaction with their work.
The result is more people feeling more stressed or burnt out and feeling that their time is more scarce than ever. With this happening on a more frequent basis you never know when you might become one of the many people suffering from workplace stress.
Lobbying Your Employer
Organisations need to utilise automation and technology, giving back time to employees and cutting their hours. I am a big fan of the four day work week. Hopefully, this is something that will become more common over time, with many organisations already switching to a 4 day week.
If you have any employee surveys or forums keep drawing their attention to this. Businesses are competitive by nature, so if one company does it they won’t want to lose their talent to other firms offering this perk.
It is estimated that in the in the US stress related absences cost a company an average $602 per employee per year, with 60% of absences being traced back to stress. In terms of the US economy alone this translates to a loss of between $150 to $300 billion annually so imagine what the global cost is.
Therefore, businesses would have to be stupid not to take your well-being seriously, by encouraging a better work-life balance.
Take A Well-Earned Break
It is not always possible to find and organisation which takes well-being seriously. Therefore, having a serious emergency travel fund can offer a way out of difficult times, even if it is just a temporary one.
In a previous article I have written about how buying experiences can make you happier. Therefore this may help with stress and even if you are lacking in optimism making this jump may help.
A major cash buffer can allow you to escape as far as a different country or continent to renew your energy. You never know, this freedom of time and location may allow you to persue your interests and ultimately make more money. Regardless of this, time is money!
Your Experiences & Thoughts
As I have said, many people have experienced some form of high stress and even burn out. If you are one of these people, please feel free to get in touch with me, either directly or share your thoughts in the comments section. Perhaps you can help other people?
If you want to save more money I have written a few articles previously that may help with this. These are below:
- How To Save Money For Travel Experiences
- Genuine Ways To Save Without Suffering!
- How To Increase Your Willpower To Save Money, Invest And Pay Off Debt
