Burnout
The state of being so depleted by chronic work stress that you can't recover with a weekend.
Origin
Coined by American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974, observing volunteers at a free clinic who had started idealistic and ended up cynical, exhausted, and detached. Christina Maslach built the empirical scaffolding through the 1980s and identified the three components — exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy — that the WHO eventually adopted when it added burnout to ICD-11 in 2019, classifying it as an occupational phenomenon (not a medical condition). Anne Helen Petersen's 2019 BuzzFeed essay 'How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation' was a generational rallying cry.
Modern usage
Default explanation for any sustained period of low output. 'I'm burned out' has replaced 'I'm tired' for an entire generation of knowledge workers. Distinguished (sometimes) from depression — burnout is supposed to lift when the workload does; depression doesn't. The term has been criticized for individualizing what are structural problems with how work is organized.
In the wild
She didn't quit because she found something better — she quit because she was burned out.— common usage
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