➺ June 18, 2026

Stroop tests freeze anxious climbers exactly the way the Volvo XC90s freeze deer. A freighted word, printed in colored ink, is shown to a test-taker prompted to name the color without reading the word. Longer response times reveal which words capture attention. According to a new study by Carleton University psychologist Nassim Tabri, gamblers' response times among people who think a lot about money are longer for the word "poor" than the word "rich.” This finding suggests money-motivate people are downside focused. Interestingly, that's the opposite of what Tabri found when studying people who think a lot about appearance. Those people responded more slowly to the word "beautiful" than to the word "fat."

Across different domains of life — health, status, money, appearance, intelligence — individuals focus on either upside (getting the thing) or downside (losing the thing). That focus is partly personal, but it’s also heavily correlated to domain. Generally speaking, domain focus tilts toward downside when the consequences of loss are more drastic than the benefits of gain. Being rich is not as good as being poor is bad. Being healthy is not as good as being sick is bad. Being promoted is not as good as being laid off is bad. But being beautiful is better than being fat is bad. And being brilliant is better than being dull is bad. Focus is as instinctual as those understandings. But so, of course, is freezing. Which is why plenty of us upsides and downsides and still wind up under the SUV.

Montessori parents who treat their children as "precious" are not overly sentimental. They are coldly calculating. What they are calculating is the total value of their child as a product of labor value and emotional value. Ancient math.

In 15th-century Florence, a boy was valued for his ability to tread fleece in a vat of urine and for the pride he inspired by praying to Saint Blaise, patron of woolcombers. In 17th-century Delft, a girl was valued for her ability to press wheels of Gouda and for the tenderness with which she sang all 150 metrical psalms.

In 21st-century Armonk, a child is valued for earning U9 travel team playing time, sawing the first eight bars of “Wilhelmus” out on a rented cello, and impressing their occupational therapist by sitting criss-cross applesauce for all of circle time. But because all of these contributions achievements carry a negative labor value, the emotional value of the child must be staggering for the child to have a positive total value. If the child isn't truly precious, the ancient math doesn't math anymore. And, yes, Atticus's mom knows this – though she'd rather burn her favorite Patagucci or swear off charcuterie than admit it.

Jonathan Malesic spent his twenties and most of his thirties chasing tenure. He got it. He hated it. He quit. He needed to know why.

His desperate attempt to reconcile who he wanted to become (Professor of Religious Studies) and who he became (not that) led him to believe his ideals made him a poor match for the requirements of his role. He now preaches the gospel of the personal pivot and argues that people who seek dignity, mastery, and purpose should fear the consequences of succeeding professionally. Just because employment is pitched as a character-building test, doesn’t mean it really is one.


Upper Middle spoke to Malesic, about burnout, The End of Burnout, and the importance of not-work.

For someone reading this who's working long hours and assuming the exhaustion is a problem about time or workload, what's a diagnostic for mismatch-driven burnout?
I've worked most of my life in academia and I've talked to a lot of academic audiences about burnout. The first thing I always have them do before they hear a word from me is talk to each other about why they got into this line of work in the first place. That's an exercise in articulating your ideals. Money can be an ideal. But there are other ideals too. 

We should check periodically: What am I hoping to get out of this job? What am I hoping to get out of my career? What financial, psychological, social, moral, and even spiritual goods ideals am I pursuing? Will I actually get them?

A version of that diagnostic the audience for this newsletter may not love hearing is.. The mismatch is probably not between what you’re worth and getting paid what you’re worth.
Getting paid just doesn’t paper over everything else that might be going wrong in your job. You can't earn your way out of burnout. If money becomes a really big concern — especially for highly educated professionals who are really worried about what they're being paid — I will bet there's something else deeply wrong in their job. They're looking to pay to compensate for that. They may not be able to.

In a well-functioning workplace, people are paid such that they don't have to think about what they're being paid. They're focused on other things.

Where can upper-middle-class professional whose identities havebeen fused with their careers since college actually start looking for the alternative source of mastery and meaning?
In the last year and a half, I decided for no real reason to start learning French. For over a year, I went in person every Saturday morning to the Alliance Francaise and saw almost the exact same people. It's slow, but I'm building real mastery. I'm about to finish the sixth complete book in French that I've read. I could not have done that a year ago. Now I can. It feels great.

There's a specific pattern among the people where work bleeds into a kind of optimization culture, and the whole self becomes a project. Is that the same disease as burnout, or a different one?
Very often, in order to express that we value a thing, we call it work. We call marriage work. We call parenting work. We call school work. We call mental health work. We even call death and dying work. And if anything is not work, it's definitely dying. You don't have to try.

There are, of course, work-like elements to all of those things. There's effort. In some cases there are structures. But it's a real failure of imagination to understand these things as valuable only insofar as they resemble our work. What we need to do is expand the realm of not-work — leisure, plus a third category, worthy activities that have an element of mastery but aren't remunerative.

Burnout has now become a vocabulary item used for everything from clinical exhaustion to a bad Tuesday. Has the inflation of the term made the real condition harder to recognize?
Definitely. We minimize real problems with our work when we see burnout everywhere. If someone is genuinely burned out, the cure is going to be a fairly radical — at minimum a new schedule, maybe different responsibilities, maybe a different role in the organization, maybe a new job, maybe a completely new career. It often takes a pretty big change to address a serious case.

When I hear people say, ‘Boy, I was really burned out last week.’ I think to myself: ‘Just for a week? That's great. What's your secret?’ It minimizes. It becomes harder to see the people who are struggling when everyone is uses the term so casually.