Burnout and Impostor Syndrome for 7 Out of 10 Knowledge Workers

“A 2022 study by work management platform Asana found that 70% of the more than 10,000 knowledge workers it surveyed across seven countries had experienced burnout or imposter syndrome in the past year.”

Blimey, that strikes me as a super big deal, right? Crisis-level-big-deal I would say!

How are we this blasé about it?!? I’ll tell you how - we’re all kinda thinking that even if we were to recognise the mental discomfort which may make us look “weak” then it ought to be ignorable. That really, even if we are burnt or fearful, we ought to still function just fine. Us and all of those around us.

It’s a horrendous fallacy but a justifiable one. After all, it’s not like we were ever asked how we felt before and surely these things are not unique just more widely spread and enterprises everywhere have been forever full of micro personal dramas and still operated as usual. Never before at this scale though.

Of the stats above, I wonder how many of those workers have just plain cape fatigue. How many were Agile Superheroes and then grew weary and tired and beaten? How many tried to bring in a new and cool piece of tech, debate or consideration around the process and were made to leave it? How many have had to be flexible and value their resistance while desperately trying to learn fast enough to catch up? How many are having any ounce of passion or initiative strangled by command and control? How many are ill-equipped to witness rotten and toxic cultural environments in tech-driven contexts where it used to be all about the 1s and 0s but it now turned into a whole other set of demands and it eventually weighs them down? I expect it’s a very high number.