Belcome to the era of the low-energy worker: his body moves, his hands tap his keyboard, he walks to get to his office… But no energy expenditure is superfluous for this zombie employee. Inside his skull, it’s the Gobi Desert: nothing happens there, and once out of work, he can’t say what he actually did with his day.
This description more or less resembles the synopsis of the dystopian series Severance (Apple TV), which alerts on the evolution of work: in a fictitious company, employees undergo an operation of separation between their professional and private memories, because they do not want to know the meaning of what they do in the office. Could this invention be a (sinister) solution to the “brown out”, a new term that describes the loss of meaning at work?
Between burnout and blackout
Halfway between burnout and blackout, the employee victim of brownout does everything except sparks. The employee in brown out sees his energy drop slowly, because the physical phenomenon precisely designates a drop in current (voluntary or not) in an electrical circuit, in order to avoid overheating.
Less famous than burnout, a more brutal phenomenon since the over-investment of an employee is suddenly overtaken by his health, brownout is also more difficult to spot. The symptoms are now well established: loss of concentration, motivation, self-confidence. Some psychologists cite an excess of cynicism or flippancy. The worker grinds black, or in this case brown (brown).
It is the big brother, and the pathological side of the expression which floods the media and the speeches of the HRDs worried in this return to school: the “quiet quitting” (or silent resignation), which consists in considering the work at its fair value , and therefore to achieve the union minimum in his position. The brown out is sometimes translated as “mental resignation”.
Here, burnout is a loss of meaning, when “bore out” (another cousin, but probably the most similar) is synonymous with chronic boredom. More than a management problem, the brown out often has to do with the employee’s job description: repetitive, the tasks are well below the level of diploma and the potential of its performer.
Less meaningful jobs
The concept is inseparable from that of “bullshit jobs”, these useless jobs which serve only to occupy workers and create nothing, theorized by the anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020). We also attribute the paternity of the brown out to the American anthropologist.
You have 28.17% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.