On work-related stress as a manic defense
There is a particular moment, familiar to almost everyone, when someone asks how you are and you respond before you’ve even thought about it. Busy. Not good, not bad — busy. The word lands safely. It signals relevance, commitment, participation. To be busy is to be accounted for. Not being busy, on the other hand, now requires an explanation.
That work-related stress has become one of the defining issues of contemporary working life is hardly controversial. Employee surveys routinely identify excessive workload as the dominant psychosocial risk. Rates of burnout and stress-related illness continue to rise. Across healthcare, education, government, finance, and tech, chronic occupational stress has become structural rather than incidental. Absenteeism, turnover, and staff shortages fill reports and headlines alike.
The explanations are well rehearsed and oddly comforting: too few people, too much administration, poorly designed processes. All solvable, at least in principle. Yet the sheer ubiquity of the problem renders these explanations insufficient. When nearly everyone feels overwhelmed, overload is no longer an exception; it is a pattern. And patterns rarely point to operational flaws alone; they point to something more fundamental.
The question, then, is whether occupational stress tells us less about work itself and more about how we understand ourselves, allocate responsibility, and organize modern society.
The psychological core: busyness as defense
To grasp the persistence of work-related stress, we need to look beyond organizational charts and into psychology. The British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described a mechanism she called manic defense: a way the psyche protects itself against feelings of powerlessness, guilt, failure, or loss. When such feelings become intolerable, they are not worked through; they are overridden. With activity. With optimism. With control.
Manic defense thrives on motion. Stillness feels dangerous. Reflection appears unproductive. A forced positivity emerges, often accompanied by a subtle sense of moral elevation: at least I’m doing something. Those who slow down risk being perceived as disengaged, insufficiently resilient, or not pulling their weight. Busyness acquires moral value.
Seen through this lens, contemporary work culture looks different. The individual rushing from task to task, managing an ever-expanding workload and optimizing even leisure time, may not be especially driven, but deeply defended. Recovery becomes another obligation. Free time turns into scheduled activity. “I’m fine, just extremely busy” often conceals confusion, exhaustion, and dissatisfaction. Occupational stress functions here as a kind of anaesthesia, not merely imposed by organizations, but actively sustained from within.
This psychological pattern aligns seamlessly with the prevailing ethos. In cultures where success is framed as individual achievement, failure becomes personal fault. That makes failure hard to bear. Constant activity dulls the discomfort. Standing still would make it felt.
From individuals to systems
What begins psychologically rarely remains individual. Defense mechanisms scale. They embed themselves in organizations, institutions, and eventually in governance and policy. There, too, the same dynamic appears: powerlessness is not acknowledged, but compensated for with activity.
Here, Carl Jung offers a crucial distinction. The collective, in his view, is not merely the sum of individual psyches. Once people organize into institutions or states, a distinct psychic reality emerges — one with its own logic and compulsion. Collectives often behave more rigidly and reactively than individuals. What might still be reflected upon at a personal level becomes unthinkable at the system level. Manic defense turns into necessity: the organization must keep moving. Stillness feels like breakdown.
At the same time, many organizations now operate under conditions of extreme complexity. They function as complex adaptive systems, non-linear, unpredictable, resistant to classical forms of control. Yet control is precisely what is pursued. Not out of ignorance, but because the alternative is psychologically intolerable. Loss of control generates anxiety. Anxiety generates action. More initiatives. More frameworks. More delivery.
In politics, this dynamic takes on ideological form. The state increasingly defines itself through the promise of manageability. Every problem must be solvable: education, healthcare, climate, and security. When implementation falters, limits are not acknowledged; effort is intensified. More funding. More oversight. More execution. The irony is hard to miss: these responses amplify complexity and, with it, systemic workload and stress.
Complexity, then, is not the primary cause of occupational stress; it is its mirror. We do not misunderstand complexity; we cannot tolerate it.
Conclusion: occupational stress as a feature of the zeitgeist
Work-related stress is therefore not individual failure, not an organizational flaw, and not merely a policy problem. It is a systemic phenomenon, and, more deeply, a feature of the zeitgeist. It reflects a collective psychic dynamic in which manic responses to limits, failure, and powerlessness have become autonomous.
Attempts to “address” occupational stress within the same framework, greater efficiency, smarter processes, and additional capacity are bound to disappoint. Not because such measures are misguided, but because they arise from the very defense that sustains the problem. They leave the foundation untouched: the belief in unlimited manageability.
This diagnosis is uncomfortable. It challenges core assumptions about modernity, responsibility, and success. And so it will provoke resistance. But as long as we keep ourselves relentlessly busy to avoid feeling what no longer works, occupational stress will remain what it has become: not a temporary inconvenience, but a symptom of a culture that has outrun itself.