Burnout?

There are signs that the current destruction of social institutions, the rule of law, and economic stability is causing burnout among elders and others.

The vibe among many elders today is burnout. You think that’s an exaggeration? Just read through some of the comments in response to Substack articles about politics, healthcare, and current events. Often, people will identify themselves as older, as having lived through social upheavals in the past.

They go on to say that they feel overwhelmed, pessimistic, soured on politics, extremely anxious, distrusting of leaders, uncertain about the future, helpless, powerless, and hopeless.

Many comments contain lengthy explanations of why people are emotionally exhausted, extremely cynical, and bereft of meaning or accomplishment in their lives. In other words, they meet the three major criteria of burnout. We’re facing collective burnout, not merely individual burnout.

Blaming the Victim

When people find it impossible to cope with life’s demands — whether at their job, as a parent, a caregiver, or in all three roles — they are often told to engage in more “self-care.”

You know the drill: “Be sure to get more sleep. Eat healthy. Exercise. Take up a hobby.” Good advice, except it doesn’t work when you’re running flat out just to hang onto a job that requires you to do more, faster.

Today, many people are running on cortisol, caffeine, or Concerta. What’s needed to keep up doesn’t promote restorative sleep or relaxation. Even after falling asleep, I have often awakened around 3:00 a.m., unable to stop my mind from racing from one source of anxiety to another.

Three years ago, I published an article, “Promotion and Burnout for College Faculty,” in my Higher Ed Success newsletter. Especially for younger, untenured women and people of color who teach in our colleges and universities, burnout has become a serious threat to their health and ability to serve their students. The reason is that they are called on to mentor more struggling students and to represent their group on committees beyond merely teaching.

What’s true for college faculty early in their careers is also true for physicians, business managers, and other employees: “Times are tough. Money is short. Yes, we’re understaffed. You just need to pick up the slack.” Often unspoken, the threat, “if you don’t, we’ll find someone who will,” is implied.

Let’s face it: late-stage capitalism imposes an insatiable demand for ever-increasing profits from businesses and other organizations. This is true for so-called nonprofits as well since they must cover operating expenses for staff and executives.

So, you pick up the slack, squeeze more hours out of other parts of your day, skimp on childcare or relating to your partner, and neglect your pets. If you don’t, you and your family may be unable to afford health insurance that we continue, stupidly, to tie to full-time employment. And you wonder why you feel exhausted, grumpy, and unable to concentrate!

Burnout in Healthcare

Elderly folks should be most concerned about burnout among physicians and other healthcare providers. Physician burnout degrades the quality of patient care, increases risk of medical errors, and reduces patient satisfaction – precisely at a time when we older folks need good care the most.

While things might be improving since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most recent study still shows that 45% of physicians report at least one major symptom of burnout. Female physicians reported 27% greater experience of burnout than male physicians. Specialties such as emergency medicine and internal medicine report higher levels of burnout – a matter of great concern to elderly patients since most geriatricians come from those specialties.

And all this occurs at a time when the Association of Medical Colleges predicts a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036.[1]

Source 1 https://www.ahrq.gov/prevention/clinician/ahrq-works/burnout/index.html

As the graphic illustrates, burnout among healthcare providers occurs because of the following factors:

• Time pressure to treat as many patients as quickly as possible to generate maximum revenue for clinical organizations

• A frequently chaotic environment that can be physically and emotionally overwhelming

• Almost no individual control over the pace at which tasks must be completed

• The responsibility to update the Electronic Health Record (EHR) for each patient – a task that often requires several hours after a clinical shift has ended

• Family responsibilities that are disrupted by all the above

Although burnout rates for other clinical staff are not tracked as closely, it is reasonable to suppose that assisted living and skilled care staff experience burnout that reduces the quality of care.

In addition to burnout among professional caregivers, family members who care for the elderly also experience burnout. Increasingly, those in their 40s and 50s find themselves sandwiched between taking care of their children and providing care for their parents. There are simply not enough hours in the day or reserves of physical and emotional energy to do both well.

Burnout Among the Elderly

Increasingly, older folks are finding it difficult or impossible to retire. The cost of basic necessities – food, housing, and healthcare – has risen across the board, far outstripping the ability of Social Security payments to keep up. As previously noted in Elder Vibes, many seniors are dependent on Social Security for their only source of income and, therefore, face hardship.

To compensate, roughly 20% of the 60 million persons aged 65 and older remain in the workforce. Of those, about 39% work part-time and the remaining 61% work full-time (35 hours/week or more). Of course, many, like me, are self-employed because of widespread (but illegal) age discrimination.[2]

Whether working for an organization or self-employed, older people encounter the same conditions that lead to burnout among younger workers. Despite calls for improving work-life balance (whatever that means), the cultural expectation is to get the job done (and increase revenue) no matter how long or how hard you need to work.

Even in the kind of freelance or contract communications work that I have done, since retiring from college teaching and administration, requires long hours, learning new skills, and self-promotion. Clients expect quick turnarounds on tight deadlines. And there is always pressure to market your own services to acquire new clients. The hamster wheel never stops.

Beyond factors that lead to individual burnout among the employed elderly, we now face social disintegration that threatens our very existence.

The so-called social safety net – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, etc. – is under direct attack by those who seek to establish an authoritarian, oligarchic regime. If those in charge succeed in destroying or hollowing out these programs, many elderly persons (and others such as needy children) will become ill and die prematurely.

Nevertheless, to speak of burnout as a threat to individual well-being that stems from a failing healthcare system, attacks on the social safety net, and stress from employment of senior citizens is to conceive it as the concern of a special interest group. However serious, burnout in this sense can be ignored as merely the complaint of older folks who are pissed off. But there’s more to it.

Cultural Burnout

I belong to the generation whose parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s and defended democracy against authoritarian tyranny during the 1940s. My peers and I grew up during the 1950s in which families could live a middle-class lifestyle on one adult's income. I could pay my private college tuition for a year during the early 1960s by working summer jobs.

To be sure, many people, especially Blacks and some immigrants, were denied opportunities to succeed educationally and economically. But there was a sense that change was possible, even inevitable.

Despite the upheavals marked by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy just five years later, the movement to finally end Jim/Jane Crow plowed forward. Schools began the (too slow) process of racial integration, and public accommodations became available to all. Hope was alive.

The turmoil wrought by having friends and relatives die in a war far away in Vietnam, a war that could never have been won, sobered many of us. I mourned college classmates who died in that war, and I worked to end it. As I began my college teaching career, a local protester immolated himself and died just outside my office window. I held his head while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. But we didn’t stop. Social wrongs needed to be righted.

Leaping ahead to today, past the time when Ronald Reagan’s policies began the hollowing out of the middle class, many of us are emotionally exhausted. We now witness a resurgence of hate against people of color, women, union members, LGBTQ+ individuals, the poor, and, to a disturbing extent, the elderly. Having struggled to secure the rights and well-being of all these groups, my generation is now dismayed by official attempts to roll back the clock.

Was the struggle of our parents against poverty and tyranny all for nothing? Was our flawed struggle for civil rights, prosperity for all, and peace worthless, something to be trashed by the very few who try to grab all the wealth and power for themselves?

Indeed, is our chance to influence events through democratic processes about to be snatched from our grasp forever?

I wish I had hopeful answers to these questions. But I fear that many in my generation are emotionally burned out. Other than giving up, however, we must support (and join, if we can) others who are not so burned out, who resist tyranny today. We don’t have long – perhaps to live or to see justice renewed once more. The next few months will tell the tale.

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NOTES

[1] John Sanford, “U.S. physician burnout rates drop yet remain worryingly high, Stanford Medicine-led study finds,” Stanford Medicine News Center, 9 April 2025, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/04/doctor-burnout-rates-what-they-mean.html.

[2] Megan Wilkins, “Golden years: older Americans at work and play,” Beyond the Numbers: Employment & Unemployment, vol. 14, no. 5 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025), https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-14/golden-years-older-americans-at-work-and-play.htm.