To move beyond slogans, it helps to treat burnout as an identifiable condition rather than a weakness. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 (2019) describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon tied to chronic workplace stress, marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. That framing matters because it shifts the narrative from “try harder” to “stress has accumulated past what the system can bear.”
Once burnout is recognized as predictable under sustained overload, the quote’s warning becomes practical: if the cost of output is chronic depletion, the supposed path to “empire” is actually eroding the very abilities—creativity, judgment, patience—that made success possible in the first place. [...]
