Welcome to the era of the low -consumption worker: his body moves, his hands pat his keyboard, he walks to go to his office … but no energy expenditure is superfluous for this zombie employee. Inside his skull, it is Gobi’s desert: nothing happens there, and once out of work, he cannot say what he concretely did with his day.
This description is more or less like the synopsis of the dystopian series Severance (Apple TV), which alerts the evolution of work: in a fictitious company, the employees undergo a separation operation between their professional and private memories, because They don’t want to know the meaning of what they are doing in the office. Would this invention be a (sinister) solution to the “brown out”, a new term which describes the loss of meaning at work?
between burn out and black-out
Halfway between burn out and black-out, the employee victim of Brown Out does everything except sparks. The employee in Brown Out sees his energy falling 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 burn out, a brutal phenomenon since the overinvestment of an employee is suddenly caught up in his health, Brown Out is also more difficult to spot. Symptoms are well established today: loss of concentration, motivation, self -confidence. Some psychologists cite an excess of cynicism or casualness. The worker is brushing black, or in this case the brown (brown).
It is the big brother, and the pathological side of the expression which floods the media and the speeches of the HRD worried in the start of the school year: the “quiet leaves” (or silent resignation), which consists in considering the work Its fair value, and therefore to carry out the minimum union at its post. The Brown Out is sometimes translated by “mental resignation”.
Here, professional exhaustion is a loss of meaning, when the “boron 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 post sheet: repetitive, the tasks are well below the level of diploma and the potential of his executor.
des Better sense trades
The concept is inseparable from that of “Bullshit Jobs”, these unnecessary jobs which only serve to occupy workers and create nothing, theorized by anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020). We also attribute the paternity of Brown Out to the American anthropologist.
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