Thank you all for your typo tolerance — they've all been fixed. (I was doing some care work yesterday and had less time than usual to triple-check everything, so again, thank you)
Currently an academic librarian at a university that is very quickly falling apart and in the process of trying to become a conservative culture warrior university (it's exactly as bad as it sounds). People are leaving at a good clip--and I'm among them.
The last day of the semester is also my last day. I can't do it anymore. I am part of a public facing unit, and now the one with the most experience due to turnover, but got told I wasn't in consideration to actually become department head/replace my supervisor who left earlier this year. And once I realized I'd be expected to run the department without a pay or rank increase and no official means/channels to move up, AND I'd have to train my new boss who would get paid more than me, I was done.
I have a job to get me by in the meantime and I'm looking for another position, but for the first time in years I feel at peace. I don't wake up dreading the day, and to me, that's worth everything.
For the first time in my life, I have a purpose/passion job with ZERO burnout and it's for one reason and one reason only -- my boss. She *demands* that we prioritize our own lives and our own self-care, to an extent that I've never experienced before. Example: I scheduled a call with her for 4 pm on Monday, just hours before my Passover seder. This call was with an external consultant to help us raise money we desperately need (I work in higher ed for an initiative that relies on outside funding) and she began the call by saying we were ending the call and needed to reschedule. She said that Passover was about to begin (I was the only observant person on the call) and we simply could not prioritize work right now. She said GOODBYE very loudly, wished me Happy Passover, and ended the Zoom. This is one of a zillion examples I could give.
Thanks, AHP, for following this burnout topic so relentlessly. Reading your writing and the Substack comments have been so helpful for me processing my own burnout.
I was a pastor for a decade and left last fall after having my ordination removed for officiating a same-gender wedding. On top of the very real lack of pay and benefits, the ethical and moral weight of working in/for an institution that very clearly refuses to care about issues of well-being and justice is hard to quantify...especially when part of my job was to articulate and encourage the exact ethical and moral values that the institution refuses to enact. Maybe close to moral injury?
In the last few years, my denomination created and implemented a really innovative new guideline for clergy compensation, a calculator that takes into account local housing costs, considering health insurance and pension benefits FIRST (before base salary) and then spitting out, based on what the congregation is able to pay, the number of hours they can expect their pastor to work. It's literally life-changing. A guardrail-insistent structural change, and congregations HATE IT. Change requires so much effort from so many corners, and even the guardrails need guardrails, you know?
Yes, and amen to everything here! When I shared the passion piece (which really affected me) on Notes saying that we need to stop acting like it's normal for employers to expect us to do uncompensated work, someone noted that this makes sense for hourly workers, but what about salaried workers?
They asked, isn't it part of the agreement that you will work more than 40 hours since you are getting benefits like health insurance and vacation time? The fact that this makes sense to most people (including me for a long time) is insane. EMPLOYERS CAN'T EMAIL EMPLOYEES AFTER HOURS IN FRANCE. This applies to salaried workers. Health care is free in most of our peer countries, but we are supposed to work more than 40 hours a week to get basically a stipend from our employer for health insurance, still pay an insane premium and then a deductible, and then pay for the actual health care? Oh, and thanks for the two weeks off after working 60-hour weeks the rest of the year. Long story short you consistently get me riled up (in a good way).
I have worked in design and tech for 20 years, and this year design has been pronounced "dead" by the industry. It's a wild shift from where we started in 2008, when Steve Jobs was out there preaching the gospel of loving your work in the church of design.
Back then, tech was also an industry of passion — pixar even made a movie about it. (Big Hero 6) We were all going to usher in a better (maybe even PERFECT!) future and Great Design was leading the charge. Tech companies have quietly sunset some of the 'don't be evil' values, but culturally, there is still the sense that if you work in the industry, you are one of the chosen ones lucky enough to be drawing up plans for The Future. Bonfire of the Vanities, but with macbooks.
I personally hit rock bottom about 7 years ago after I had a kid and could no longer work 70 hours weeks at what I thought was my dream job helping women have more financial control, and my lack of time investment was clearly seen as a lack of passion for The Mission (albeit I must note that I kind of let it get that way — I was searching to fill a hole in my heart, and working hard had always been a good way to get the approval I was looking for.) But when I left it almost broke me. I didn't just leave the job, I left behind what I thought it meant to live a good life.
Last year, when the tech industry laid off nearly 300,000 people, I watched as that same pain smeared all over LinkedIn. It was heartbreaking — all these passionate people who had worked so hard and been taken for granted, utterly shocked by how disposable they felt. The posts felt more like they belonged at a memorial service than on a professional networking platform.
I think the problem with passion jobs goes much deeper than the roles we typically think of as care work — Americans believe that work should be their passion, no matter what kind of work they are doing. How much you earn, how hard you work, how much you give are still our main measures of assessing whether we're living a good life.
We must demand more from our employers and our government — but I also think that there is individual work to be done around deconstructing how we define success and how we spend our time. Revolution happens in systems because it is happening in small conversations at home and with friends as well.
I wrote a piece on the high-performing-school-to-all-consuming-tech-job pipeline and the effects this kind of passion=work=money mindset is having on kids and adults alike, might be related:
I work in elections. Not politics. The actual operations of running elections. I used to be the head if a county elections department and was in charge of candidate filing, ballot preparation, hiring and training poll workers, managing polling places, tabulation, and reporting results, and more. After 2020, I left that job and moved to the state level. In 2022, I left that job and started going to therapy where I realized that I was completely burned out.
And I'm not alone! The entire election community is burned out. Turnover is at an all time high. The stresses involved in this work only increase. And I'm not even talking about the political nonsense. Doing more with less is the unofficial elections motto. And yes, most election administrators are women earning low salaries. Some of them have multiple job duties with elections only being a portion of their jobs.
I now work as a consultant and help people who are still doing the front line election work so I still get to be close to the work but not too close. And yet, I'm feeling the signs of burnout again. I work for a consulting group of type A overachiever who are seemingly always on the clock. I do consider this passion work and I struggle against my own internal voice saying "do more." But I'm also reading articles like yours and trying to do self therapy, by meditating, walking, taking breaks, scheduling vacations, cross stitching, reading fiction, setting boundaries, etc. I can't wait to the other comments here because I'm learn some new ideas. If I have one idea that can help others, it's this: I turned off notifications on my phone for work email and slack. Best. Decision. Ever.
Yesssssss! I am a college professor in a passion field—and many of my students are double-majoring, so it feels even more like they’re in my department for the fun and joy and passion of it all.
I don’t have that much power at the moment to change the official culture (first year visiting professor!), but I set very clear communication boundaries, including what time I stop answering emails and texts from students (it’s one-on-one teaching so texting is not uncommon). My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind. I was also lucky enough to have a fantastic colleague tell me up front not to let this job take over my life, and to let him know if I ever felt that the load was overwhelming, because it’s not important enough. As I tell my students, we take music very seriously but at the end of the day, it’s not neurosurgery or figuring out climate change.
The other thing that’s going on right now is that the classical music industry is actually on fire, after an article came out exploring 10-year-old rape allegations against two male members of the New York Philharmonic, leading to their victims and other female players who stood up for the victims not receiving tenure in the orchestra. So having this passion for an industry that is so, so inequitable feels a little dissonant (no pun intended).
My seventh year of teaching was over, I loved my school and my kids, I was at the point of where I was forming lasting relationships where my kids who were now graduating college were still texting and asking for life advice. Maybe I could expand my program, or get a student teacher, I thought.
Then we lost students and teachers got cut - I was gone, because the arts die first. I was forced into an elementary school with forty five kids and no support per class, funding everything from my own pockets. It was almost a relief when a family emergency meant that I quit and moved back to my childhood home.
I didn’t think I was burned out. And yet - I’m sleeping well for the first time in a decade. I’m reading for pleasure for the first time in years. I actually played a video game the other day!
I still get to be with kids, managing the teen section and programming of a city library. But there’s so much less red tape, so many fewer forms. I can talk to a teenager about his future without the nagging thoughts of “yeah he has his state tests coming up soon, gotta do my yearly training for those and start planning how testing will disrupt my lessons”. I can just focus on him and his needs.
My coworkers are quitting in droves. I used to be judgey, a pretentious feeling of “well I’m doing okay, I guess they just couldn’t cut it”. Now I’m just glad to see them in their new jobs with smiles on their faces, and my heart breaks for the students that don’t get to have teachers who feel genuinely happy in their lives.
As a teacher, I can confirm and want to restack every word in this piece. I’ve been writing about this myself. We have to stop just “looking for the helpers” in situations of dire need, as Mr. Rogers once said, and start really seeing their humanity and their needs as well. We can’t just ignore care workers until we need them, tell them that if they “really care” they’d work for free, and then act surprised when very few people can actually stay in their care work sustainably given all that.
My industry (vet med) is in the process of eating itself alive through private equity.
So far, all I have managed to do is be an example of someone who doesn't bing drink at conferences to cope.
It feels like a very big problem, that I am very alone in solving. Because the answer is ALWAYS start your own hospital. And frankly, that is a terrible answer.
I have ideas but...trying to get people together to form a more cooperative type work environment requires...people to cooperate. And if 25 years in vet med has taught me anything...it is that people don't really want to cooperate. They want to be right.
Libraries and the library workers that comprise them are suffering from similar challenges faced by peers in teaching, nursing, and other social work professions. Factors such as mission creep; low or stagnant pay; defunding of initiatives for addressing systemic racism; a growing misunderstanding of what library workers do; and the indelible burden of trying to redress the archival debt of unquestioning whiteness (in our systems of cataloging, approaches to teaching, practices of hiring and retention) have destabilized the profession. There is a growing movement towards helping library workers be more trauma-informed in not only how they work with the public but also how they approach one another as colleagues and caring humans. This is a necessary corrective to administrations that rely so hard on data-oriented storytelling that they forget the messiness of the people we are—and those we are in community with as a service industry. There are also grassroots organizing efforts to help library workers unionize but as we know, such efforts can take years and steady momentum. But these are bandages in a country where rising economic inflation, climate change, and growing distrust of governmental institutions have spread wildly. This conflagration is a threat that we have and haven't fully experienced.
As for me? The way out is in. Being present, accountable, and when possible, boundaried. Being open to what we can do individually to make the workplace more humane but also attempting to influence those in power to lead with love and grace. It's small. It may not lead to much. But it keeps me treading water.
I was in a passion job until December, but the rare one that historically tried to protect work-life balance. We weren't supposed to work *too* many hours. When we were on vacation, we were on vacation (if the boss saw you send an email or pop into slack, you were reminded to go be on vacation). But it was nonetheless a burnout factory because management was lousy.
There was like one good manager in each department and they were always the person who was relied on to fix what was broken but not given the authority to keep it from getting broken to begin with. Upper management set the policies, and the policies constantly changed without ever consulting the people doing the work day to day or offering any solid rationales for the changes. More than once the way a policy change was conveyed to non-management was when we were essentially told we'd been doing it wrong for two weeks since a policy change we hadn't been told about.
Unless you were a manager, your expertise was not appreciated -- you were to unquestioningly do the bidding of managers, even though in many cases they were less experienced/credentialed/qualified than non-managers. (These sharp distinctions between managers and non-managers showed up when non-managers dared to unionize. Top management saw that as a personal insult and mentally divided the company into two teams, even though to that point a lot of the managerial titles had been handed out kind of haphazardly so there wasn't a ton of distinction.) It's amazing the way you can not be working outrageous hours and have plenty of vacation time and be in a passion job and love your immediate coworkers and still have the soul absolutely sucked out of you every single day.
I’m surprised to not see more health care workers commenting here. Healthcare is a burnout extravaganza no matter where you work. I worked in family medicine for three years and while I was there eleven other providers came and went. It’s madness. Now I’m in a “passion” job in sexual/repro health and TBH I do love it but every single person is underpaid and particularly among the non-licensed support staff it’s basically just a rotating door with folks leaving after 6-12 months. The other thing about passion jobs is that folks coming in often put the org up on a pedestal and then are disappointed to find that we have all the same workplace problems as everyone else 🙃
What saves me from burnout is I do the maximum amount I want to do, which some weeks is the bare minimum. When I got a new job with a very "passionate" boss, I worried that my clear boundaries (I don't have outlook alerts on my phone, sorry) would read as not caring. But I just listen to feedback. As long as my boss and coworkers think I'm doing a good job, I tend to worry much less about how many hours I applied myself that week. This shift in focus to external results, external feedback vs the guilt loop in my head helps me just work less. and better!
And finally, just a few minutes before reading this piece I saw this post script in an email signature from a Chief of Staff of a City Agency (govt can often be low paying "passion work")
"Please know that I respect boundaries around personal time, well-being, caretaking, and rest. If my email reaches you during these moments, please prioritize your time and respond when it's convenient for you. I encourage you to prioritize self-care over immediate email responses. Rest assured, I am committed to the same principle."
Thank you all for your typo tolerance — they've all been fixed. (I was doing some care work yesterday and had less time than usual to triple-check everything, so again, thank you)
Currently an academic librarian at a university that is very quickly falling apart and in the process of trying to become a conservative culture warrior university (it's exactly as bad as it sounds). People are leaving at a good clip--and I'm among them.
The last day of the semester is also my last day. I can't do it anymore. I am part of a public facing unit, and now the one with the most experience due to turnover, but got told I wasn't in consideration to actually become department head/replace my supervisor who left earlier this year. And once I realized I'd be expected to run the department without a pay or rank increase and no official means/channels to move up, AND I'd have to train my new boss who would get paid more than me, I was done.
I have a job to get me by in the meantime and I'm looking for another position, but for the first time in years I feel at peace. I don't wake up dreading the day, and to me, that's worth everything.
For the first time in my life, I have a purpose/passion job with ZERO burnout and it's for one reason and one reason only -- my boss. She *demands* that we prioritize our own lives and our own self-care, to an extent that I've never experienced before. Example: I scheduled a call with her for 4 pm on Monday, just hours before my Passover seder. This call was with an external consultant to help us raise money we desperately need (I work in higher ed for an initiative that relies on outside funding) and she began the call by saying we were ending the call and needed to reschedule. She said that Passover was about to begin (I was the only observant person on the call) and we simply could not prioritize work right now. She said GOODBYE very loudly, wished me Happy Passover, and ended the Zoom. This is one of a zillion examples I could give.
Thanks, AHP, for following this burnout topic so relentlessly. Reading your writing and the Substack comments have been so helpful for me processing my own burnout.
I was a pastor for a decade and left last fall after having my ordination removed for officiating a same-gender wedding. On top of the very real lack of pay and benefits, the ethical and moral weight of working in/for an institution that very clearly refuses to care about issues of well-being and justice is hard to quantify...especially when part of my job was to articulate and encourage the exact ethical and moral values that the institution refuses to enact. Maybe close to moral injury?
In the last few years, my denomination created and implemented a really innovative new guideline for clergy compensation, a calculator that takes into account local housing costs, considering health insurance and pension benefits FIRST (before base salary) and then spitting out, based on what the congregation is able to pay, the number of hours they can expect their pastor to work. It's literally life-changing. A guardrail-insistent structural change, and congregations HATE IT. Change requires so much effort from so many corners, and even the guardrails need guardrails, you know?
Yes, and amen to everything here! When I shared the passion piece (which really affected me) on Notes saying that we need to stop acting like it's normal for employers to expect us to do uncompensated work, someone noted that this makes sense for hourly workers, but what about salaried workers?
They asked, isn't it part of the agreement that you will work more than 40 hours since you are getting benefits like health insurance and vacation time? The fact that this makes sense to most people (including me for a long time) is insane. EMPLOYERS CAN'T EMAIL EMPLOYEES AFTER HOURS IN FRANCE. This applies to salaried workers. Health care is free in most of our peer countries, but we are supposed to work more than 40 hours a week to get basically a stipend from our employer for health insurance, still pay an insane premium and then a deductible, and then pay for the actual health care? Oh, and thanks for the two weeks off after working 60-hour weeks the rest of the year. Long story short you consistently get me riled up (in a good way).
I have worked in design and tech for 20 years, and this year design has been pronounced "dead" by the industry. It's a wild shift from where we started in 2008, when Steve Jobs was out there preaching the gospel of loving your work in the church of design.
Back then, tech was also an industry of passion — pixar even made a movie about it. (Big Hero 6) We were all going to usher in a better (maybe even PERFECT!) future and Great Design was leading the charge. Tech companies have quietly sunset some of the 'don't be evil' values, but culturally, there is still the sense that if you work in the industry, you are one of the chosen ones lucky enough to be drawing up plans for The Future. Bonfire of the Vanities, but with macbooks.
I personally hit rock bottom about 7 years ago after I had a kid and could no longer work 70 hours weeks at what I thought was my dream job helping women have more financial control, and my lack of time investment was clearly seen as a lack of passion for The Mission (albeit I must note that I kind of let it get that way — I was searching to fill a hole in my heart, and working hard had always been a good way to get the approval I was looking for.) But when I left it almost broke me. I didn't just leave the job, I left behind what I thought it meant to live a good life.
Last year, when the tech industry laid off nearly 300,000 people, I watched as that same pain smeared all over LinkedIn. It was heartbreaking — all these passionate people who had worked so hard and been taken for granted, utterly shocked by how disposable they felt. The posts felt more like they belonged at a memorial service than on a professional networking platform.
I think the problem with passion jobs goes much deeper than the roles we typically think of as care work — Americans believe that work should be their passion, no matter what kind of work they are doing. How much you earn, how hard you work, how much you give are still our main measures of assessing whether we're living a good life.
We must demand more from our employers and our government — but I also think that there is individual work to be done around deconstructing how we define success and how we spend our time. Revolution happens in systems because it is happening in small conversations at home and with friends as well.
I wrote a piece on the high-performing-school-to-all-consuming-tech-job pipeline and the effects this kind of passion=work=money mindset is having on kids and adults alike, might be related:
https://onpurposeproject.substack.com/p/whats-lost-from-winning?r=f96pn
I work in elections. Not politics. The actual operations of running elections. I used to be the head if a county elections department and was in charge of candidate filing, ballot preparation, hiring and training poll workers, managing polling places, tabulation, and reporting results, and more. After 2020, I left that job and moved to the state level. In 2022, I left that job and started going to therapy where I realized that I was completely burned out.
And I'm not alone! The entire election community is burned out. Turnover is at an all time high. The stresses involved in this work only increase. And I'm not even talking about the political nonsense. Doing more with less is the unofficial elections motto. And yes, most election administrators are women earning low salaries. Some of them have multiple job duties with elections only being a portion of their jobs.
I now work as a consultant and help people who are still doing the front line election work so I still get to be close to the work but not too close. And yet, I'm feeling the signs of burnout again. I work for a consulting group of type A overachiever who are seemingly always on the clock. I do consider this passion work and I struggle against my own internal voice saying "do more." But I'm also reading articles like yours and trying to do self therapy, by meditating, walking, taking breaks, scheduling vacations, cross stitching, reading fiction, setting boundaries, etc. I can't wait to the other comments here because I'm learn some new ideas. If I have one idea that can help others, it's this: I turned off notifications on my phone for work email and slack. Best. Decision. Ever.
Yesssssss! I am a college professor in a passion field—and many of my students are double-majoring, so it feels even more like they’re in my department for the fun and joy and passion of it all.
I don’t have that much power at the moment to change the official culture (first year visiting professor!), but I set very clear communication boundaries, including what time I stop answering emails and texts from students (it’s one-on-one teaching so texting is not uncommon). My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind. I was also lucky enough to have a fantastic colleague tell me up front not to let this job take over my life, and to let him know if I ever felt that the load was overwhelming, because it’s not important enough. As I tell my students, we take music very seriously but at the end of the day, it’s not neurosurgery or figuring out climate change.
The other thing that’s going on right now is that the classical music industry is actually on fire, after an article came out exploring 10-year-old rape allegations against two male members of the New York Philharmonic, leading to their victims and other female players who stood up for the victims not receiving tenure in the orchestra. So having this passion for an industry that is so, so inequitable feels a little dissonant (no pun intended).
I didn’t think I was burned out.
My seventh year of teaching was over, I loved my school and my kids, I was at the point of where I was forming lasting relationships where my kids who were now graduating college were still texting and asking for life advice. Maybe I could expand my program, or get a student teacher, I thought.
Then we lost students and teachers got cut - I was gone, because the arts die first. I was forced into an elementary school with forty five kids and no support per class, funding everything from my own pockets. It was almost a relief when a family emergency meant that I quit and moved back to my childhood home.
I didn’t think I was burned out. And yet - I’m sleeping well for the first time in a decade. I’m reading for pleasure for the first time in years. I actually played a video game the other day!
I still get to be with kids, managing the teen section and programming of a city library. But there’s so much less red tape, so many fewer forms. I can talk to a teenager about his future without the nagging thoughts of “yeah he has his state tests coming up soon, gotta do my yearly training for those and start planning how testing will disrupt my lessons”. I can just focus on him and his needs.
My coworkers are quitting in droves. I used to be judgey, a pretentious feeling of “well I’m doing okay, I guess they just couldn’t cut it”. Now I’m just glad to see them in their new jobs with smiles on their faces, and my heart breaks for the students that don’t get to have teachers who feel genuinely happy in their lives.
It's not talked about as much as faculty members, but administrative support staff at universities are also overworked and burnt out.
As a teacher, I can confirm and want to restack every word in this piece. I’ve been writing about this myself. We have to stop just “looking for the helpers” in situations of dire need, as Mr. Rogers once said, and start really seeing their humanity and their needs as well. We can’t just ignore care workers until we need them, tell them that if they “really care” they’d work for free, and then act surprised when very few people can actually stay in their care work sustainably given all that.
My industry (vet med) is in the process of eating itself alive through private equity.
So far, all I have managed to do is be an example of someone who doesn't bing drink at conferences to cope.
It feels like a very big problem, that I am very alone in solving. Because the answer is ALWAYS start your own hospital. And frankly, that is a terrible answer.
I have ideas but...trying to get people together to form a more cooperative type work environment requires...people to cooperate. And if 25 years in vet med has taught me anything...it is that people don't really want to cooperate. They want to be right.
Libraries and the library workers that comprise them are suffering from similar challenges faced by peers in teaching, nursing, and other social work professions. Factors such as mission creep; low or stagnant pay; defunding of initiatives for addressing systemic racism; a growing misunderstanding of what library workers do; and the indelible burden of trying to redress the archival debt of unquestioning whiteness (in our systems of cataloging, approaches to teaching, practices of hiring and retention) have destabilized the profession. There is a growing movement towards helping library workers be more trauma-informed in not only how they work with the public but also how they approach one another as colleagues and caring humans. This is a necessary corrective to administrations that rely so hard on data-oriented storytelling that they forget the messiness of the people we are—and those we are in community with as a service industry. There are also grassroots organizing efforts to help library workers unionize but as we know, such efforts can take years and steady momentum. But these are bandages in a country where rising economic inflation, climate change, and growing distrust of governmental institutions have spread wildly. This conflagration is a threat that we have and haven't fully experienced.
As for me? The way out is in. Being present, accountable, and when possible, boundaried. Being open to what we can do individually to make the workplace more humane but also attempting to influence those in power to lead with love and grace. It's small. It may not lead to much. But it keeps me treading water.
I was in a passion job until December, but the rare one that historically tried to protect work-life balance. We weren't supposed to work *too* many hours. When we were on vacation, we were on vacation (if the boss saw you send an email or pop into slack, you were reminded to go be on vacation). But it was nonetheless a burnout factory because management was lousy.
There was like one good manager in each department and they were always the person who was relied on to fix what was broken but not given the authority to keep it from getting broken to begin with. Upper management set the policies, and the policies constantly changed without ever consulting the people doing the work day to day or offering any solid rationales for the changes. More than once the way a policy change was conveyed to non-management was when we were essentially told we'd been doing it wrong for two weeks since a policy change we hadn't been told about.
Unless you were a manager, your expertise was not appreciated -- you were to unquestioningly do the bidding of managers, even though in many cases they were less experienced/credentialed/qualified than non-managers. (These sharp distinctions between managers and non-managers showed up when non-managers dared to unionize. Top management saw that as a personal insult and mentally divided the company into two teams, even though to that point a lot of the managerial titles had been handed out kind of haphazardly so there wasn't a ton of distinction.) It's amazing the way you can not be working outrageous hours and have plenty of vacation time and be in a passion job and love your immediate coworkers and still have the soul absolutely sucked out of you every single day.
I’m surprised to not see more health care workers commenting here. Healthcare is a burnout extravaganza no matter where you work. I worked in family medicine for three years and while I was there eleven other providers came and went. It’s madness. Now I’m in a “passion” job in sexual/repro health and TBH I do love it but every single person is underpaid and particularly among the non-licensed support staff it’s basically just a rotating door with folks leaving after 6-12 months. The other thing about passion jobs is that folks coming in often put the org up on a pedestal and then are disappointed to find that we have all the same workplace problems as everyone else 🙃
What saves me from burnout is I do the maximum amount I want to do, which some weeks is the bare minimum. When I got a new job with a very "passionate" boss, I worried that my clear boundaries (I don't have outlook alerts on my phone, sorry) would read as not caring. But I just listen to feedback. As long as my boss and coworkers think I'm doing a good job, I tend to worry much less about how many hours I applied myself that week. This shift in focus to external results, external feedback vs the guilt loop in my head helps me just work less. and better!
And finally, just a few minutes before reading this piece I saw this post script in an email signature from a Chief of Staff of a City Agency (govt can often be low paying "passion work")
"Please know that I respect boundaries around personal time, well-being, caretaking, and rest. If my email reaches you during these moments, please prioritize your time and respond when it's convenient for you. I encourage you to prioritize self-care over immediate email responses. Rest assured, I am committed to the same principle."
I love it, especially from someone at the top.