This is More Existential Than Burnout
Political unrest, AI, and RTO are creating the conditions for an epidemic of moral injury at work. Here's what it looks like from the inside.
In February of 2020, a friend and I took a trip to Hawaii. Every morning I’d wander into the hotel lobby for coffee in flip flops, a caftan, floppy hat and blithely fill my cup while a TV above the coffee bar would be playing CNN on mute, scrolling through alarming headlines about a new virus called COVID-19. Looking back, it’s exactly like the opening scene of every apocalypse film, right before the main characters realize what’s coming.
Scrolling through the news and LinkedIn right now feels like that again.
I believe we are on the early edge of an epidemic of moral injury in workplaces.
What’s Moral Injury?
It’s a psychological term naming the thing that happens when we witness or participate in activities that conflict with our beliefs. It’s most studied with military or healthcare personnel: think doctors having to deny care (ie Dr. Mohan on The Pitt having to send a diabetic patient home because he can’t afford treatment). Think soldiers having to make a decision that they can’t save someone because it will put the whole platoon at risk. But you don’t need to be on a battlefield to experience it.
Research describes the signs as withdrawal, self-sabotage, cratering performance, and aggression. Physical symptoms include insomnia and chronic pain. It is not burnout. Burnout is exhaustion. Your brain hits the wall, your energy (and motivation and concentration) goes with it.
Burnout responds to rest because burnout is a signal that you need rest. Moral injury is something else: I can’t keep doing this and be who I think I am. That doesn’t respond to rest.
In uniquely bad news for companies, research shows that the people most likely to experience moral injury are the ones who most identify with the organization or team — who most believed in the work, the mission, the people. The most engaged. The ones who cared the most.
The conditions that create an epidemic
The conditions for an epidemic don’t emerge from a single cause. (It’s not just Gwenneth Paltrow sneezing ominously in Contagion.) Three forces are converging right now like competing storm fronts rolling in from all directions.
Political instability always impacts the workplace. In a recent workforce survey, 75% of respondents said political uncertainty is a driver of work burnout. And I don’t need to cite research that shows that we are in the midst of massive political uncertainty. Where this becomes moral injury: when leaders stay silent on policies that directly affect the people who work for them (immigration enforcement, healthcare access, civil rights, climate change) employees experience that silence as complicity.
The labor power shift has exposed what was always true. The Great Resignation was workers claiming power, demanding better conditions, insisting on their worth. The backlash has been swift. Amazon ordered employees back to Seattle offices, then laid off 30,000 people. Women are leaving the workforce at record rates because employers have refused to accommodate the reality of working parents. Those who believed the rhetoric about valuing their people now see it for what it was: temporary concessions during a labor shortage, revoked the moment the balance shifted.
AI has created a new category of professional dread. JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon has predicted civil unrest due to AI’s impact on employment. Struggling job seekers are being hired to train the systems designed to make their own roles obsolete. Meta employees must consent to keystroke and mouse monitoring to feed the AI beast in order to keep their jobs. While companies are claiming recent layoffs are due to AI, the reality is that many cuts are to feed the bottom line. The truth is, we have no idea how AI will affect our lives and our work. But it feels to most of us as an inevitable and unknowable dark cloud on the horizon.
Each of these situations creates the perfect conditions for moral injury at work. All of them at once is ground zero for an epidemic.
Just last week, Gallup found that manager engagement (not worker engagement, manager engagement ) has fallen from 31% to 22% in three years. A nine-point collapse. The same research found that leaders, compared to individual contributors, are substantially more likely to report experiencing stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness on any given day. They climbed toward a level that was supposed to feel more meaningful. It feels less.
What it looks like from the inside
Years ago, when I was a (considerably younger) fired-up comms leader, I was at a job where I was certain the leadership team was making decisions that were wrong — strategically and ethically. I was put in a position to do things that conflicted directly with my values.
I was talking (ranting?) about it to my boss when she stopped me.
“Want to know what I’m hearing?”
“Anger?” I said.
“Contempt. There’s research that shows once you’ve gotten to contempt in a relationship, there’s no going back.”
She was right. I was feeling contempt. And while it was aimed at leadership, something more complicated was going on inside: I was feeling contempt for myself. Corrosive, ugly, painful.
That was the signal I needed. I left.
Moral injury shows up as contempt. Shame. Anxiety.
It shows up as cynicism. You used to believe in the work, or at least in the people doing it, and now you don’t. You can’t fully explain when that changed.
It shows up as reluctance to talk about your job. Not out of confidentiality. Something about saying it out loud feels like admitting something.
It shows up as a gap between how you describe your work to other people and what you actually think about it when you’re alone. The version you tell at a dinner party and the version that lives in your chest at 2 a.m.
It shows up as self-sabotage — forgetting meetings, showing up late, unable to engage. Some part of you does not want to be there.
Moral injury is not a mental health diagnosis. It is a framework for understanding what happens to people whose internal alarm systems are working correctly — people who are being required to violate their values and are reacting accordingly.
If the epidemic argument lands for you, it is because you are inside it or watching it happen to people you know.
Your signal is working.
The problem is not you.
One question worth turning over this week: What are you telling yourself you're fine with?
If this named something you’re experiencing, I work with people navigating exactly this. The first step is the Initial Signal Assessment — 60 minutes, $350, available as a standalone. It starts with a conversation.