The Great Resignation is a Mental Health Crisis

And the modern lie of work-life balance.

There is a phenomenon going on in America today that people have dubbed “the Great Resignation.” People are leaving jobs at increased rates and employers are struggling to fill the open positions they have. For some, it seems that no combination of wages and benefits will attract workers.

As part of this, the workers are being painted with a broad brush. Many call them lazy or entitled, demanding unreasonable wages and unrealistic benefits for menial jobs. Signs on drive-thrus chide employees for quitting and billboards encourage people to get off their butts and go work.

Workers, for their part, complain that they are paid unreasonably low wages with no benefits for thankless jobs with no upward trajectory. Jobs in fast food and retail are considered so transient that turnover for most fast-food restaurants exceeds 100% in a year. Retail isn’t much better, and workers are sick of being treated as disposable.

While this seems like a basic problem — workers don’t want the jobs that are available for one reason or another — it is likely much deeper than that. Fundamentally, the people who flip burgers and stock shelves are tired of having random schedules and not enough support in exchange for meager pay and benefits. In other words, the stress of working the job isn’t worth what they’re paying for it.

Going deeper, however, starts to show the mental health crisis associated with all of this. We have been sold the premise of work-life balance — work should not infringe on your personal life — only to have our bosses ask us to stay late, pick up that extra shift, and come in on our day off.

There comes a point where the overtime isn’t worth the effort, and as I’ve said before, if my choices are to be poor and work a thankless job or be poor and stay home, I know what I’d pick. I’ve worked jobs where 13 workdays in a row was a regular occurrence, and I was on the verge of a mental breakdown at the end of it. Add to that the fact that one of the jobs I was working at the time was retail, with crappy customers and an unforgiving pace, and there were points where I was literally suicidal.

The calculus for workers these days is that the mental health strain of dealing with entitled customers, doing a hard and thankless job, and getting paid peanuts isn’t worth the mental health strain it causes. Even people like me, who work professional jobs and sit in offices, have found that bosses who micromanage and expect 60-hour weeks aren’t worth the salary and benefits they do get. So, people quit in droves.

Work-life balance is, more or less, a happy little lie that we tell ourselves and each other. People like me used to work eight-ish hours a day with an unpaid half-hour for lunch. We would also spend an hour each morning getting ready for work and anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours each day commuting, both of which are work-related things. All told, we would dedicate 10–12 hours of our lives each day doing work things, which was a massive hit to our mental health.

People who work those retail and food service jobs didn’t have it much better. They have similar work prep and commute times but work jobs that are much more physically demanding and have to deal with terrible customers. All of that, I might add, for much less pay and few if any benefits.

Now, 18 months into COVID times, there has been a fundamental shift in both of these situations. The retail and foodservice workers were suddenly catapulted to the position of “essential worker,” even though the pay and benefits didn’t increase much. This was despite them literally putting their health and lives on the line for, more often than not, wages and benefits that were still terrible.

At some point, the mental strain of that gets to be too much, and it comes time to quit. If I were in that position, my mental (much less physical) health is much more important to me than crappy wages, benefits, customers, and conditions. Again, I’d rather be poor and sane at home than poor and stressed at work.

For people like me, who used to work in offices, many of us are discovering that we actually enjoy working from home and not having all that non-work work time. I don’t really care for commuting, no matter whether I’m listening to the news, an audiobook, or music. It just feels like wasted time. Not having to spend a bunch of time prepping for work is also nice. I can spend my time before work doing things for me, like writing, playing games, or just enjoying a peaceful breakfast.

I can also manage my mental health much better at home. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a bad morning, grabbed a 45-minute nap, and was able to finish my projects afterward because I was actually refreshed. I’ve had days where I spent an hour on the couch with a video game and had the energy to finish out my day strong thanks to the break.

Running errands during the day helps relieve the stress of doing them when it’s busy in the evening. Taking the cat to the vet or going to the doctor is no longer a major issue because I don’t have to deal with coming home first or going out of my way. While work has been stressful lately, doing my work from home has enabled me to help keep my mental health up.

That said, more and more businesses are demanding that their workers return to the office, and the workers are deciding that they don’t want to. I’m not currently looking for work, but if I was, working from home would be non-negotiable. I’ve made too many mental health gains to go back to the office five days a week.

The workforce has taken this moment as an opportunity to look at the work we do, and by and large, we have found our employers lacking. We are asked to give our bodies and minds over to the job for pay that is as low as the market can bear, and we have decided that we will no longer do so.

People I have talked to are tired of breaking their bodies and sacrificing their mental health for jobs where their employers won’t miss them if they die. Employers who try to use a “fun” office culture and perks like free food and happy hours are just trying to further blur the lines between work and life, extracting as much out of us as they can while giving us as little as possible in return. By shifting the balance away from “life” and towards “work,” they can continue to take advantage of cheap labor and a surplus of workers.

Now, however, American workers have decided that no, their lives are not worth the toll caused by the available work. We stress ourselves out trying to make ends meet, driving ourselves to depression and substance use just to cope while breaking our bodies at jobs that don’t care whether we live or die. For me and many others, destroying our mental health for a paycheck that gets us less and less every year isn’t worth it.

Life has become increasingly expensive, and when you look at the cost of something as the amount of your life you have to spend to buy it, things become stark. When the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and a Big Mac meal costs $9, do you really want to spend an hour and fifteen minutes of your life to buy a burger and fries that took a few minutes to make and cost a fraction of that in supplies?

I wouldn’t.

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