Holding the Line Doesn't Need to Mean Losing Ourselves

What burnout is really trying to tell us

By Michael Braithwaite, NBT Co-Founder

Image: Thabang Lehobye for ArtistsForClimate.org

This off-cycle piece is part of our ongoing exploration into the deeper narrative and cultural foundations of burnout, leadership, and institutional design in an era of systemic risk and polycrisis — and what it will take for values-driven institutions to endure without fracturing from within.

For the past few months, I’ve been in conversation with leaders across a variety of fields, from philanthropy to civil society to climate investment, and beyond financial uncertainty and stress, the number one topic of conversation has been burnout. Either leaders in it or leaders worried about their teams. It’s concerning but not totally surprising.

As we collectively survey the landscape before us, the converging forces are impossible for any of us to ignore: a hostile and erratic administration that threatens civil society groups daring to challenge its ideology, the systematic cutting off of federal funding streams that have sustained critical work for decades, the targeted undermining of universities and local governments, and the openly floated attacks on philanthropic institutions that have historically provided buffer against political volatility and helped to push society towards a more just future. Meanwhile, the cost of living continues its relentless climb and economic and regulatory stability erodes like shoreline in a hurricane. People doing community-rooted, mission-critical work find themselves expected to operate with normalcy and poise inside structures that were never designed to withstand these conditions or support human beings through such sustained uncertainty.

We’re squarely in the danger zone for a burnout surge across all manner of mission-driven organizations, not because people suddenly care less about their work, but because the systems around them are destabilizing at an accelerating pace while the internal structures meant to support them haven't evolved to meet this precarious moment. And yet, I can’t help but think that the rupture playing out beneath all of this goes deeper than logistics or finance — it’s a narrative fracture causing significant dissonance.

It’s tempting to believe that the reality we're facing is a temporary blip, a possible "burnout season" that will pass with the next funding cycle or administration change, but the unfortunate truth is that we’ve all collectively designed burnout infrastructure.

It’s baked into the very foundations of how we've constructed our organizations and movements, even many of those with liberatory visions.

The Public Narrative

What was once confined to private struggles behind closed office doors has now transformed into a public story that we're all watching unfold in real time, as burnout seeps through the collective consciousness with increasing urgency and visibility. The data confirms what many have intuited: Google Trends reveals search interest in "burnout" rising steadily since 2015, with a notable peak emerging from a fairly consistent baseline in 2018 before making a dramatic jump in 2021 and continuing its upward trajectory through today. It has never once returned to pre-pandemic levels despite multiple attempts at "return to normal" across sectors.

Burnout Search Trends

Source: Google Trends. Search term: burnout (United States, 2015–2025)

Even as the headlines about remote work policies and the much-discussed "great resignation" have faded from the media cycle, public concern about burnout has remained stubbornly elevated. This reflects more than a temporary reaction to pandemic conditions. Instead, it indicates a more fundamental, long-term shift in how people relate to work, professional identity, and the recognition of personal limits in a world that seems increasingly determined to ignore them.

Burnout in the Headlines

Source: MediaCloud. Query: burnout in U.S. national news outlets (2020–2025)

Media coverage across national outlets has closely followed this narrative arc, with mentions of burnout spiking dramatically throughout 2021-2022 before plateauing at a baseline significantly higher than anything we saw before the pandemic reshaped our relationship with work. This persistent attention tells us something crucial about our current moment: burnout has become part of our social and cultural inheritence.

The institutional instinct in times of crisis is nearly always to triage — to circulate wellness tips that place responsibility back on the individual, to plan a team-building day that momentarily lifts spirits before dropping everyone back into the same unsustainable conditions, or to update the HR handbook with policies that look good on paper but don't address the underlying structural problems that drive people to breaking points. These are well-intentioned approaches that reflect an understanding that something is wrong and needs to be addressed.

However, these surface-level fixes, profoundly miss the deeper collective opportunity that burnout actually presents: to treat it as a systems signal pointing toward institutional misalignment — one that demands structural reimagining.

What we're confronting is an inherited operating system shaped by centuries of cultural programming that now runs so deep as to appear natural: productivity framed as moral virtue, overwork celebrated as proof of loyalty or mission dedication, and rest stigmatized as unprofessional or an indicator that someone lacks dedication to the cause. These aren't truths about human nature or organizational necessity, but rather cultural relics still quietly running in the background of most organizations — even those explicitly attempting to build more liberated and environmentally healthy futures — creating invisible barriers to genuine transformation of workplace culture and practice.

The Values Gap

Source: Shalom Schwartz values map, from a lecture by Schwartz

Burnout flourishes most aggressively in the environments where one might expect it least: in organizations devoted to social change, where people are routinely asked to advance liberatory missions inside fundamentally extractive frameworks that mirror the very systems they're trying to transform. It shows up at the friction point between stated values and operational reality — where compassion or wellbeing are verbally encouraged in strategic planning sessions, but constant depletion is systematically rewarded in practice; where justice, care, and equity are named in mission statements, but day-to-day norms require self-abandonment, urgency-as-loyalty, or sacrifice in service of ideals that haven’t been structurally embodied.

Under the relentless pressures of late-stage capitalism, this profound misalignment between stated values and lived organizational reality gets neatly repackaged as a mindset issue requiring individual correction rather than structural change: adjust your attitude, practice more gratitude, take a mindfulness walk, reconnect with your purpose, work on your boundaries. As though burnout were merely a failure of personal resilience or a blip on a busy day’s schedule rather than a rational response to untenable conditions.

But the far better and more uncomfortable question facing our organizations is this: Are the people within them being asked to embody values that the structure itself actively punishes when put into practice?

Are they being implicitly required to uphold contradictions that their nervous systems recognize as unsustainable even when their conscious minds have been convinced these contradictions are necessary sacrifices for the greater good?

What we're discovering is that burnout isn't fundamentally about doing too much (though overwork is certainly a common symptom), but rather about doing things that are right for environments that are wrong for us.

The nervous system can only paper over that disconnect for so long before the underlying misalignment becomes impossible to ignore, and something fundamental within us begins to break under the weight of sustained cognitive dissonance or moral injury.

Data, Not Weakness

What becomes possible when we fundamentally reframe our understanding of burnout? Not as a personal weakness requiring better self-management, but as valuable organizational data providing crucial feedback about system function and alignment.

What if we approached burnout as a sophisticated values-sensing mechanism built into human physiology? Like a finely tuned alarm system signaling a gap between what we deeply believe and what we're being asked to perform day after day. The alarm tells us when we’ve collectively stretched beyond what any of our nervous systems can sustainably tolerate before shutting down non-essential functions to survive.

This reframing matters profoundly in our current polycrisis — an era where ecological, economic, and political systems are simultaneously fraying at an accelerating pace, while our collective capacity to respond diminishes under the weight of information overload and uncertainty.

The rising tide of burnout across sectors signals something essential about our moment: that the inherited myths that have structured our relationship to work for generations (e.g. hard work guarantees stability, that individual devotion can somehow outrun institutional dysfunction, that purpose should indefinitely override personal limits) are losing their grip on our collective nervous system as their promises repeatedly fail to materialize in lived experience.

You certainly don't need hostile political environments or economic volatility to burn out your team — organizational cultures perfectly capable of doing that existed long before our current crises — but these external factors undeniably accelerate the collapse of unsustainable systems by increasing the baseline stress everyone carries before they even begin their workday.

When people are already emotionally depleted, the misalignments and contradictions between an organization's stated values and its operational reality go from slightly disappointing to actively intolerable. Then it becomes a choice between leaving if they can, or worse, staying because they have no other options and slowly fracturing from within. When that happens, particularly at scale within an organization, it risks taking your mission, impact, and reputation down.

Regenerative Design

Image: Silvana Pacheco for ArtistsForClimate.org

Meaningfully addressing burnout across our organizations requires moving beyond merely managing symptoms through individual-focused interventions toward the more challenging work of building systems that can metabolize pressure and uncertainty without breaking the people inside them. These are systems designed with the recognition that human beings aren’t extractable resources but living organisms with natural cycles of energy, creativity, and necessary rest. Regenerative workplaces that can weather the current and coming storms have begun prioritizing several interconnected elements that create the conditions for sustainable engagement:

• Rhythms over relentless pace: Establishing operating cadences and work patterns that honor natural energy cycles and the reality of human capacity, not just arbitrary deadlines or constant output expectations. This recognizes that sustainability requires oscillation between periods of intense focus and genuine recovery, not a marathon of perpetual productivity that inevitably leads to diminishing returns and eventual collapse.

• Distributed decision-making: Developing structures that ensure leadership doesn't become a bottleneck for progress while simultaneously addressing the soul-crushing powerlessness that staff often feel when they have responsibility without authority or voice. This creates multiple pathways for influence that match authority with accountability in ways that prevent both the overwhelm of centralized leadership and the disengagement of those carrying out the work.

• Care as infrastructure: Moving beyond care as an aspirational value posted on office walls toward building it systematically into calendars, compensation structures, conflict resolution processes, and organizational culture. This treats care as the essential foundation upon which all sustainable work must be built if an organization hopes to weather the inevitable challenges of pursuing transformative change.

• Narrative alignment: Ensuring that the story an organization tells publicly about its values and vision is actually felt and experienced internally by the people responsible for bringing that vision to life. This closes the gap between external messaging and internal reality. In doing so, it reduces the cognitive dissonance that fuels burnout and cynicism while building the authentic coherence that sustains commitment through difficulties.

This approach to organizational design is a clear-eyed survival strategy for mission-driven institutions. In a crisis-fueled climate that actively undermines the work of educators, organizers, climate activists and entrepreneurs, and movement builders (while simultaneously demanding ever more from them), thoughtful internal design becomes the critical space where people can experience enough stability and support to continue showing up fully engaged rather than in emergency reserves.

Burnout will rise. But so can alignment if we’re willing to build internal systems as resilient, rooted, and values-aligned as the futures we’re trying to create.