Have you ever thrown far more time and energy into your work than you get paid for? Have you ever said yes to a request to be on a dull and time-consuming committee because you want to show what a great colleague you are? Have you ever done too much for too little, because you hope that it will all pay off in the end when you get that secure job, that PhD position, or that grant? If so, my friend, you've been engaging in hope labour, and Dr David Brax is worried about you. With stress, burnout, and precarity rife in academia, Dr Brax is asking: should universities be profiting from the unpaid efforts of people who may or may not end up rewarded for their efforts?

Dr David Brax is a senior investigator at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research at the University of Gothenburg. You can find him on Bluesky. Here's Google's English translation of a recent article that he wrote in Swedish about hope labour.

So, that last episode that didn't happen. What was going on there, then? It was burnout, friends. Followed by trying and failing to take some relaxing time off. It wasn't all in vain, though. Here are some reflections on burnout, the battle to relax, and the dangers of disconnecting from our own needs.

References:

Cohen, Josh. 2016: 'Is there more to burnout than working too hard?' The Economist, 29th June.

Cohen, Josh. 2016: 'The way out of burnout', The Economist, 28th July.

Hauser, CJ. 2019: 'The Crane Wife', The Paris Review, 16th July.