Latest / The Burnout Podcast with Fexingo: Workplace Exhaustion, Recovery, and Sustainable Careers / How Climate Grief Is Fueling a New Kind of Career Burnout
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something I've been noticing more and more in career coaching conversations and even in my own social feeds — something that doesn't have a neat category yet, but it's driving a lot of quiet exhaustion. Luna: I'm listening. What is it? Lucas: Climate grief. Not just eco-anxiety in the abstract, but the specific, cumulative weight of watching the world unravel in slow motion while you're supposed to show up and hit your quarterly targets. I think it's creating a new strain of career burnout that's distinct from overwork or bad management. Luna: It's funny you say that. I was reading a piece from the American Psychological Association's 2025 stress survey — 62 percent of Americans under 35 said climate distress affects their daily functioning. That's not a fringe statistic. Lucas: Right, and that survey also found that among people aged 18 to 34, climate distress was second only to money as a source of significant stress. But here's the part that connects to our show: when you're in a career that feels even tangentially related to the problem — whether you work in sustainability, tech, finance, even healthcare — that distress can get compounded by a sense of futility. Luna: So it's not just feeling sad about the planet. It's feeling like your work either doesn't matter or, worse, contributes to the problem. Lucas: Exactly. There's a term for it that I first heard from environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht — 'solastalgia.' It's the grief of losing your home environment while you're still in it. Not displacement, but a slow erosion of the baseline you grew up with. And I think for a lot of knowledge workers, that baseline includes a belief that the world is stable enough that your career planning makes sense. Luna: When that baseline erodes, the whole premise of 'work hard, retire, enjoy' starts to feel hollow. That's exhausting in a different way than a 60-hour week. Lucas: It's a cognitive and emotional load. A friend of mine — let's call her Sarah — worked as a product manager at a large tech company. She led a project to calculate the carbon footprint of their cloud infrastructure. She found that the team's data storage alone was generating emissions equivalent to a small European country. She presented the findings, suggested efficiency improvements, and the response was basically a shrug. No mandate, no follow-through. Luna: And I'm guessing she didn't just move on. Lucas: She lasted another eight months. But she told me that every stand-up meeting, every sprint planning session, started to feel like she was participating in a lie. She wasn't burned out from the work — she was burned out from the moral injury of knowing the impact and being unable to change it. She eventually quit to work for a climate nonprofit, and she told me her energy came back within weeks. Luna: That's a powerful example, but not everyone can just switch to a nonprofit. So what do you do if you're in a role where you can't avoid that gap between what you know and what your company does? Lucas: That's the core question. And I think the first step is naming it. A lot of people feel this low-grade dread and think it's just anxiety or burnout from normal causes. But when you realize it's specifically tied to environmental grief, you can start to address it differently. Luna: How do you address it differently? I mean, you can't just meditate away the melting ice caps. Lucas: No, and I'm not going to suggest that. But there are two evidence-informed tactics that come out of climate psychology. The first is what I call 'doom-scrolling windows.' Instead of letting climate news seep into every moment of the day — which is what our phones are designed to do — you schedule a specific 15-minute window each day to catch up. The rest of the time, you treat it like you would any other distracting notification. You train your brain that this is a scheduled concern, not a constant background hum. Luna: That makes sense. It's like a worry time technique, but for planetary anxiety. And the second tactic? Lucas: Values-aligned micro-actions. The research from people like Renee Lertzman, who studies climate psychology, suggests that the feeling of agency is critical. You need to do something, however small, that aligns your daily life with your values. It could be as simple as switching your 401k to a fossil-fuel-free option, or starting a composting bin at work, or even just talking to your manager about one sustainability initiative that you care about. The key is that it's an action you chose, not one imposed on you. Luna: And that restores a sense of control. I've read that even symbolic actions can reduce feelings of helplessness. Though I wonder — does that risk making people feel like they've done enough when systemic change is still needed? Lucas: It's a fair concern. But the goal isn't to solve climate change with a composting bin. The goal is to prevent the burnout that makes you check out entirely. Because a burned-out person doesn't contribute to systemic change either. Think of it as respiratory care for the person who's going to run the marathon, not the marathon itself. Luna: I like that framing. And speaking of keeping people in the race — this feels like a good moment to mention that this podcast itself is a small project that runs on listener support. We keep it ad-free because we think these conversations are important, and that's only possible because some of you chip in a few dollars a month. If you've gotten something out of episodes like this, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Even a couple of bucks makes a real difference in keeping us going. Lucas: Yeah, it genuinely does. And it's one of those values-aligned micro-actions we were just talking about. So back to the topic — I think the other important piece is that climate grief burnout doesn't just affect people in explicitly environmental roles. It affects anyone whose career feels detached from meaning in a world that seems to be burning. Luna: So you're saying a software engineer at a fintech startup might feel it just as much as someone at an oil company? Lucas: Potentially more, because the fintech engineer might console themselves that they're 'not as bad' as oil, but still feel that their work has zero connection to anything that matters. That gap — between what you care about and what your day produces — is a classic driver of burnout, and climate grief widens it. Luna: What about people who aren't particularly climate-anxious? Is this relevant to them? Lucas: I think it's relevant because the cultural conversation is shifting. Even if you're not personally distressed, you're probably working alongside people who are. Understanding this dynamic can make you a better manager or colleague. And second, the same logic applies to other forms of systemic grief — political polarization, social injustice. The mechanism of moral injury plus helplessness is the same. Luna: So the overarching lesson is: if you feel a persistent, low-grade exhaustion that doesn't match your workload, check if it's grief. And if it is, give yourself permission to treat it as such, with specific strategies rather than just pushing through. Lucas: Exactly. And one more thing — I'd encourage people to find a community around this. There are climate cafes, online groups, even workplace affinity groups now. Grief shared is grief halved, and that's especially true when the source is something as large as the state of the planet. Luna: It's a strange time to be building a career. But I think naming this feeling is the first step toward not being paralyzed by it. Lucas: Yeah. And we'll keep exploring these angles in future episodes. For now, I'd say: pay attention to what your exhaustion is telling you. It might not be that you're working too hard. It might be that you're caring too much in a context that doesn't support that care. Luna: And that's a valid reason to make a change — even if the change is just a 15-minute doom-scrolling window and a composting bin. Lucas: Exactly. We'll talk next time.