Are we too tired, or too separated?

Burnout has become a common word. It shows up in corridor conversations, LinkedIn posts, medical diagnoses, and HR policies. Smart, highly skilled and, in theory, privileged people keep saying the same thing: they are exhausted, cynical, and left with the feeling that nothing they do really matters.

What is striking is that this exhaustion does not appear as an exception. It is the norm. When an entire social group breaks down in the same way, the problem is unlikely to be individual.

The dominant narrative explains burnout as a failure of personal management: poorly distributed energy, unclear boundaries, a poor work-life balance, too much emotional labour. The response almost always comes in the form of self-care, strategic breaks, mindfulness, or routine adjustments. All of this may ease symptoms, but it does not explain the cause. Burnout describes how we feel, not why we got here.

To understand the phenomenon more deeply, we need to recover a concept that has been carefully removed from the contemporary vocabulary: alienation of work.

At its most basic level, to alienate means to create distance. It is to make something feel strange or external, as if it no longer belongs to you. We use the word this way in everyday language — when someone feels alienated from the world — and also in legal contexts, where property can be alienated, meaning transferred or sold. In all cases, the idea is the same: a broken link. Something that should be connected to you is moved outside your reach, your control, your lived experience. Alienation of work, then, means that control over one’s own work no longer sits with the person who actually does it.

It is from this sense of distance that Marx uses the term to describe something structural, not psychological. Alienation is not lack of motivation, nor absence of purpose. It is the condition in which the worker is separated from what they produce, from how they produce, from other workers, and ultimately from themselves. What has changed since the nineteenth century is not alienation itself, but how it appears, and the ideological effort to rename it.

In tech and design, alienation often comes disguised as privilege. We work with ideas, not machines. We create interfaces, flows, experiences. We are creative. We speak of impact, users, meaning. And yet, everyday experience tells a different story.

First, there is alienation from the product. Designers and UX practitioners rarely see anything as “finished”. Work is fragmented into tickets, sprints, and endless iterations. The final product belongs to the company, the roadmap, or the market, never to those who conceived it. What was meant to solve a real problem often ends up as another abandoned experiment, a disabled feature flag, or an artefact buried in Figma. The effort remains, the meaning does not.

Then, there is alienation from the process. The rhetoric speaks of autonomy, but work is tightly mediated by metrics, frameworks, and tools. OKRs, dashboards, and A/B tests begin to dictate decisions that were once human and situated. The designer participates, gives input, but rarely decides. They work a lot, but wield little power of influence. Exhaustion here does not come from too many tasks, but from a persistent sense of impotence.

There is also alienation from others. Teamwork is celebrated, yet evaluation remains individual — teams are rarely assessed as teams in feedback or performance cycles. Portfolios, promotions, and recognition depend on personal visibility rather than collective construction. Colleagues become silent competitors, since it is structurally impossible to reward everyone fairly within the current system. Collaboration exists in discourse, but the structure encourages constant comparison and competition. The result is a specific kind of loneliness: surrounded by people, yet organisationally isolated.

Finally, the deepest form of alienation: alienation from oneself. In tech, identity and work are deeply intertwined. Being a designer is not merely a profession, but a way of being. Curiosity, empathy, creativity, critical thinking — all of this is captured as productive force.

The problem is that this capture is not neutral. To function, it requires constant accommodation between what the subject is capable of imagining and what the system is willing to absorb. Creative anxiety, moments of insight, the impulse to experiment — precisely what generates value in cognitive labour — must be domesticated, postponed, or silenced to fit roadmaps, metrics, and organisational expectations.

The result is a daily negation of the self. It is not only about doing something one does not believe in, but about learning to dampen one’s own desire, reduce one’s own potential, suspend who one is in order to keep functioning. When work loses meaning, it is not only the job that enters into crisis, but identity itself.

Burnout then appears as a personal collapse only on the surface. At a deeper level, it is the subjective expression of an objective process: the moment when the subject can no longer sustain the functional character that the system demands.

Seen this way, burnout ceases to be a clinical mystery. Exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of inefficacy are coherent responses to alienated work. Rest helps, changing jobs may delay the problem, but none of this touches the root. The structure remains.

It is no coincidence that corporate discourse prefers to speak of burnout rather than alienation. Burnout can be treated without conflict. Alienation points directly to relations of production, power, and control. One can receive palliative care in the form of workshops. The other requires transformation.

Naming alienation is neither an ideological exercise nor academic nostalgia. It is about recovering an analytical tool that still explains, with uncomfortable precision, the malaise of contemporary work. Perhaps we are not too tired. Perhaps we have been, for a long time, too separated from what we do, from others, and from ourselves.

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