Burnout isn’t new — 18th-century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustion (Writer's Bloc)

Burnout isn’t new — 18th-century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustionBurnout isn’t newPhoto: Artvee George Morland’s The Labourer’s Rest depicts the daily rhythms of rural labour in 18th-century England. In “burnout,” the metaphorical concept within the term is something like “workers are fuel.” ‘Moonlighting’ followed the same patternThe material and social bases of burnout have been generalized over time. This term may date to same period as burnout, much earlier than the Oxford English Dictionary’s first attestation in 1957. But the personal mental or emotional nature of today’s concept belies its social, material basis.