Nearly 40 per cent of Canadian workers say they feel burnt out often or always, according to a 2025 survey by Mental Health Research Canada and Canada Life. The term has become part of a broader lexicon of modern work, alongside quiet quitting, hustle culture and grindset and “taskmasking.”

But burnout is older than this current moment of concern suggests. The World Health Organization first classified it in 1990, in the International Classification of Diseases, defining it as “a state of vital exhaustion.”

The WHO later redefined the term as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” characterized by feelings of exhaustion, detachment and a lack of accomplishment.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word itself to 1937, but the term is even older than that. More than 200 years ago, agriculturalists and workers used the phrase “burnt out” to describe fertilizer kilns, fuel, matches, fires and the consequences of excessive work.

The phrase ‘burnt out’ is centuries old

Writing in his 1771 travelogue The Farmer’s Tour Through the East of England, agriculturalist Arthur Young documented farmers pushed to physical and emotional collapse by relentless work. For instance, he tells the story of a sub-tenant farmer, William White.

White worked hard to master new techniques of irrigation and climbed from “a day labourer to a little farmer” despite having been “twice burnt out, by which accident he lost a hundred pounds, notwithstanding the uncommon industry of repairing his buildings with his own hands.”

In other words, White’s barn burned down twice. He couldn’t stop farming while rebuilding it, which meant he was working much harder than before, to the point where he lost........

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