To balance the need for breadth (everyone feels a bit burned out) and depth (some are so burned out, they can no longer do their jobs), we ought to think of burnout not as a state but as a spectrum. In most public discussion of burnout, we talk about workers who “are burned out,” as if that status were black and white. A black-and-white view cannot account for the variety of burnout experience, though. If there is a clear line between burned out and not, as there is with a lightbulb, then we have no good way to categorize people who say they are burned out but still manage to do their work competently. Thinking about burnout as a spectrum solves this problem; those who claim burnout but are not debilitated by it are simply dealing with a partial or less-severe form of it. They are experiencing burnout without being burned out. Burnout hasn’t had the last word.
* debilitate: 쇠약하게 하다