The sidelined self and the reality of "boreout"
In 2010, Frédéric Desnard, an employee at the French luxury perfume company Interparfums, found his professional life suddenly emptied of meaning. After the company lost a major contract, his bosses sidelined him. He spent the next four years with almost nothing to do. His daily responsibilities shrank to minor office chores, like buying a few sheets of paper, after which he had to sit through the remaining hours.
Desnard later described the deep isolation of those days. At first, he browsed the internet, but eventually, the sheer uselessness of his position broke him down. He would lock himself in an empty office and cry. The constant strain of pretending to be busy led to severe depression and eventually caused him to have an epileptic fit while driving. Following a long sick leave, Interparfums fired him in 2014, claiming his absence disrupted the business. Desnard took them to court, and in 2020, a Paris appeals court ruled that this forced inactivity was a form of harassment, awarding him €40,000 in damages for what is now known as "boreout".
This case is more than a bizarre corporate anecdote. It is the quiet reality of boreout, a condition distinct from burnout but just as damaging to the mind. While burnout is the result of relentless overwork, boreout is the slow exhaustion of having no real purpose or challenge. It is the stress of unfulfillment and the taxing performance of "fake busyness".
To survive in these roles, people develop elaborate coping mechanisms. Some use the "stretching work" strategy, artificially dragging a simple three-hour task over an entire week by taking frequent coffee breaks, chatting, or hiding in the bathrooms. Others practice "pseudo-commitment," staying late at their desks or pretending to have intense, professional conversations on personal calls to look indispensable. The psychoanalyst Marcello de Souza notes that the human mind cannot tolerate a vacuum of meaning; when we are stripped of active agency, our mental and physical health begins to fail.
Unlike burnout sufferers, who face physical muscle aches and extreme exhaustion from over-demand , those experiencing boreout deal with a low-arousal lethargy, sleep disruption, and a chronic drop in self-esteem. Both conditions represent a severe disconnection between who we are and what we are forced to do.
The Fordist deal, capitalist alienation, and neoliberal precarity
The modern decay of work has deep historical roots. In the mid-twentieth century, industrial societies rested on the "Fordist deal". Under this arrangement, assembly-line workers accepted dull, repetitive tasks in exchange for steady wages and job security, enabling them to buy the goods they made. It was a stable compromise that relied on manageable workers and predictable consumers.
Under modern neoliberal capitalism, this compromise has disappeared. Job security is gone, replaced by shifting contracts and constant financial worry in the gig economy. Even professionals and middle managers who spent years earning credentials find themselves vulnerable to sudden layoffs, as automated systems or corporate downsizing replace their expertise.
This reality brings us back to Karl Marx's theory of alienated labor. Marx argued that under capitalism, alienation is an objective condition built into the system of production, not just a personal feeling of unhappiness. He identified four ways this system separates us from our natural state :
First, we are alienated from the product of our labor. What we make belongs to the business owner, not to us, and our own work is turned into capital that is used to control us. Second, we are alienated from the act of labor itself. Work is not a voluntary expression of our minds, but a forced chore directed by managers or software. Third, we are alienated from our "species-being," which is our natural human urge to create. When work is reduced to a repetitive grind for survival, we are stripped of our creative capacity. Finally, we are alienated from other people. Because the market forces us to compete for jobs and survival, we learn to view each other as rivals rather than collaborators.
The performance society and the trap of voluntary self-exploitation
This alienation has taken on a more subtle form in recent decades. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that we have moved from a "disciplinary society" of factories and prisons—governed by external rules and physical boundaries—to a "performance society" of offices and shopping malls. In this new world, we see ourselves as "entrepreneurs of ourselves" rather than exploited workers.
This shift makes exploitation remarkably efficient. Believing we are entirely free and that "nothing is impossible," we willingly push ourselves to the brink. The old manager who ordered us around has been internalized; we are now the prisoner and the guard, the exploiter and the exploited. We work ourselves to exhaustion because we believe we are self-actualizing, even without a manager holding a whip.
This setup also prevents political resistance. When we fail, we do not blame systemic inequalities; we blame ourselves, and we turn our frustration inward as anxiety and depression.
Furthermore, this frantic pace of life makes it impossible to think deeply. Creative work requires quiet reflection and slow attention, but modern work demands "hyperattention," where we constantly jump between emails and notifications. Han notes that this multitasking is not a sign of progress, but a regression. It mimics the survival instincts of wild animals, which must constantly scan their surroundings while eating to avoid predators. By celebrating constant activity and rejecting the value of quiet boredom, we reduce our lives to a frantic struggle for survival.
The market of escape: Shopping and the illusion of choice
When work offers no room for creative expression, we look for comfort in our spare time, which is increasingly dominated by shopping. In 2005, a Guardian column by Will Hutton defended shopping as a form of personal freedom, describing the "shopping ecstasy" he felt at the Bluewater shopping center in Kent.
The public response to his column showed the hollow nature of this belief. Readers pointed out that this "freedom" is only available to those with money to spend, which leaves those on low incomes entirely shut out. Others noted that consumerism is just corporate profit disguised as personal choice, and encourages us to buy disposable things to keep the economy afloat. True individuality is rarely found in a mall, and a culture that revolves around shopping forces us into a vain race to keep up with social standards. Moreover, the cheap goods that bring us pleasure in wealthy nations often rely on the exploitation of workers in poorer parts of the world.
This critique matches Erich Fromm’s distinction between the "having" and "being" modes of life. In the having mode, we define our worth by what we possess and consume. Modern advertising encourages a passive, receptive attitude, where we live with an "open mouth," constantly swallowing new products, digital media, and experiences. We use this passive consumption to quiet our inner boredom and powerlessness, but buying things only hides the symptoms without fixing the underlying emptiness.
Even our personal taste has been commodified. Whether we are millionaires who hire art consultants or suburban homeowners who follow interior design trends, we often outsource our aesthetic decisions to market experts. The things we buy and the spaces we live in are no longer reflections of our inner lives; they are converted into "cultural capital" used to show off our social status.
The pointless job: David Graeber’s theory versus statistical reality
The feeling that our work is fundamentally meaningless was framed by the anthropologist David Graeber in his theory of "bullshit jobs". Graeber argued that a huge portion of white-collar work is entirely useless or even harmful. He wrote that rather than giving us a fifteen-hour workweek, as John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930, automation has been used to create massive administrative bureaucracies and endless busywork. A busy public has less time or energy to challenge the political status quo.
Graeber identified five types of pointless work: "flunkies," whose jobs exist to make their bosses look important; "goons," who act as aggressive advocates, like corporate lawyers and lobbyists; "duct tapers," who temporarily patch up systemic glitches that the company refuses to fix; "box tickers," who fill out endless reports so the organization can claim it is solving a problem; and "taskmasters," who create unnecessary administrative work for people who do not need supervision.
While Graeber's theory is popular, sociologists have tested his claims with empirical data. Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham analyzed the European Working Conditions Survey and found a different picture. Graeber claimed that up to sixty percent of jobs are useless, but the survey showed that only 4.8% of EU workers (and 5.6% in the UK) felt their work was rarely or never useful. Furthermore, this percentage fell between 2005 and 2015, which contradicts Graeber's claim that pointless jobs are rapidly increasing.
The study also showed that roles Graeber labeled as essential, such as cleaners and refuse collectors, actually reported higher feelings of uselessness than administrative and legal professionals. This suggests that the feeling of a "dead soul" at work is often caused by the conditions of the labor rather than the job itself. When workers have no autonomy, face intense speed-ups, and lack supportive relationships, even useful work can feel completely meaningless.
Reclaiming agency through flow and craftsmanship
To break out of this cycle of passive consumption and empty work, we need to find ways to create actively. This active engagement is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow," a state of deep concentration where our action and awareness merge, our self-consciousness disappears, and we are completely absorbed in a rewarding task.