This article really resonated with me for a lot of reasons and I think you're right, at least in many cases. There was another piece recently (at The Atlantic?

This article really resonated with me for a lot of reasons and I think you're right, at least in many cases. There was another piece recently (at The Atlantic?) that was talking about how many cases of burnout are really better thought of as moral injury. This perspective seemed closer to home for me. It's not the work per se, not the hours (although I think it can be that) -- it's this increasing gap between what your job is on paper, and what it actually is, and no acknowledgment of it from institutions or society, no recognition of it being a problem in your career or workplace, or the dysfunction and pain it causes. In my case, I think initially some saw it as burnout or needing a break. I had friends talk to me about their own resistance to it in terms of their work ethic or some nonsense like that. But they worked in places with functional departments, where nothing remotely similar would happen to them, where there were support structures in place for things that needed to happen, and so forth and so on. Every job has some stuff that you let slide, that's less than optimal or ideal from a moral or ethical perspective, that you do for practical reasons, or whatever, but there's a point where the gap just gets to be too much, and when your workplace or even field isn't acknowledging the stuff going on, or minimizing it, it starts to feel hopeless. The Atlantic piece was talking about this all in terms of nursing and all the issues involved, how it wasn't the workload that caused people to resign, it was, to paraphrase, this moral crisis, or crisis of dignity or something. Stuff having to do with healthcare system collapse, the culture in healthcare and in the US and so forth. I think from what I've seen with myself and colleagues, "moral dissonance" or something might be closer to the right word than "moral injury", although neither are quite right. I'm not sure there's a term I've heard that gets it right. It's like the train has run off the track, and you either stay on board because on paper it's still on the track and you get benefits from it (material and otherwise), or you jump off the train and hit the ground but at least don't let the train carry you away. I do think in some cases it's about the hours. But in many cases it really isn't about the hours, it's that there's enormous problems that everyone is ignoring or minimizing one way or another.