The Sisyphus Syndrome.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternity of useless efforts. His task was to roll a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down just as he reached the summit. For many in the performing arts, this story feels less like a myth and more like a job description.

The joy of participating in the creative process of the performing arts becomes an insufferable chore if it is weighed down with work that seems like a waste of time, is not part of your job description, and often contributes nothing to the creative process. Sound familiar? If so, you may be exhibiting the signs of workplace burnout.

The entertainment industry is experiencing a mental health crisis, and job burnout is high on the list of contributing factors. When we talk about "burnout," we often frame it as a personal health crisis. Employees are advised to practice "self-care," take a yoga class, or download a meditation app. This is all good advice, but only addresses part of the problem.

Christina Maslach, an emeritus psychology professor at UC Berkeley, is a leading figure in the scientific exploration of occupational burnout. Maslach examined how workers managed emotional stress and identified a consistent pattern of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a feeling of failure. Her most significant contribution is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a tool to measure the three dimensions of burnout:

• Emotional Exhaustion: Feeling overextended and drained by one's work.

• Depersonalization (Cynicism): Developing a detached or callous response to tasks and the work in general.

• Reduced Personal Accomplishment: A decline in feelings of competence and successful achievement at work. A sense of failure.

Notably, Maslach sought to debunk the assumptions about how we view people who exhibit signs of burnout:

Across most of the twentieth century, in coal mines around the world, miners took caged canaries underground with them to test the air quality. The canary’s high sensitivity to carbon monoxide and other toxic gases meant that, if it swayed on its perch, or even collapsed, the coal miners were forewarned in sufficient time to get out. The practice was ended by the 1990s, but to stretch the metaphor let’s say our hope was to keep more birds singing in mines. What would be our best approach? Should we try fixing the canary to make it stronger and more resilient—a tough old bird that could take whatever conditions it faced? Or should we fix the mine, clearing the toxic fumes and doing whatever else necessary to make it safe for canaries (and miners) to do their work?*

In other words, burnout is a workplace problem, not a worker problem. It is the result of a mismatch between the person and the organization in areas like workload, control, and values.

In the entertainment world, we are used to wearing many hats. We can accept a certain amount of "slash" job titles as long as it reflects the work that we are tasked to do (e.g. Production Manager/Technical Director/Associate Professor). But there is a specific kind of stress that comes from what researcher Norbert Semmer calls "Illegitimate Tasks." These are tasks that an employee perceives as unnecessary or outside the core of their professional identity. For a dedicated non profit arts manager, an illegitimate task might be spending three hours fixing a broken printer because the organization won't hire a tech contractor. Semmer refers to these tasks as "Stress to Offense to Self" (SOS). When you are highly trained in the arts but spend your day on "junk" tasks that don't contribute to the mission, the boulder of Sisyphus becomes ten times heavier.

Further, there is a unique layer of this stress found in performing arts venues affiliated with larger institutions, such as educational institutions or city-run agencies. Here, we see a clash between two management styles defined by MIT professor Douglas McGregor: Theory X and Theory Y. Performing arts organizations generally aspire to operate under Theory Y—the belief that employees can be self-motivated, crave responsibility, and are driven by the creative mission. However, the overarching bureaucracy (the University or the City) often operates under Theory X—a style characterized by formalized supervision and defined limits on employee autonomy. In these larger institutions, the "illegitimate tasks" multiply. Arts administrators find themselves buried under layers of mandatory HR training modules, IT threat-assessment trainings, and redundant procurement paperwork that have nothing to do with theater management. These tasks are vital to the bureaucracy but meaningless to the employee's professional identity. This creates a "square peg in a round hole" feeling; the worker is a creative problem-solver being forced into a rigid, compliance-based box.

What happens when the burned out employee finally goes home at night? Research by CUNY professor Zhiqing Zhou has highlighted a phenomenon known as "end-of-work anger." His research suggests this anger often leads to "next-day counterproductive work behavior" (CWB). This isn't laziness; it’s a psychological defense mechanism. If you leave the venue feeling exploited or unheard, having spent half a day on bureaucratic compliance rather than creative work, you are statistically more likely the next day to withdraw, perform tasks with less care, or experience friction with colleagues. This frustration builds over time, and leads to burnout. CWB is not limited to managers; for stagehands in particular, in a high-stakes backstage environment where safety and precision are paramount, this behavior can be dangerous.

As an industry, we need to stop trying to fix the canaries and start fixing the mines. Until that happens, recognize your own MBI burnout. If you are feeling exhausted and cynical, and are starting to question your talents, stop asking what is wrong with you. If you're constantly subjected to the SOS of offense-to-self, you may need to acknowledge that some illegitimate tasks are legitimately a waste of your time. And if on a daily basis you're feeling the end of day anger of CWB, it may be time to look for another job.

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*Maslach, Christina; Leiter, Michael P. (2002). The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs. Harvard University Press, p.1.