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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Brazilian startup workers have appropriated the term burnout as a key vocabulary to articulate experiences of psychological suffering related to work.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Brazilian startup workers have appropriated the term burnout as a key vocabulary to articulate experiences of psychological suffering related to work. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Brazilian startup ecosystem between 2020 and 2024, it analyses burnout not simply as a clinical diagnosis or an individual mental health issue, but as an emic category through which workers make sense of exhaustion, overwork, and emotional distress in highly competitive and performance-oriented environments. I argue that burnout functions as a mediating concept between labour, health, and responsibility. For workers, it provides a socially recognised language to legitimise suffering that might otherwise be interpreted as personal failure or lack of resilience. At the same time, burnout circulates within corporate and managerial discourses that frame ill-health as an individual risk to be managed through self-care, therapy, or performance recovery programs, rather than as a structural consequence of work organisation. The paper situates burnout within broader transformations in the organisation of labour in the technology sector, characterised by flexible work arrangements, continuous performance evaluation, and intensified productivity under venture capital logics. While burnout enables workers to name and communicate distress, it rarely translates into collective mobilisation or demands for structural change. The paper thus explores the political ambivalence of burnout as a contemporary vocabulary of work-related ill-health.