You take the vacation. You come back Monday. Three days later you feel exactly the same. That's not a willpower problem, and it's probably not a workload problem either.

Simon Sinek tells a story about a military leader whose troops were falling apart under operational tempo she couldn't slow down. Instead of handing out days off, she asked the room how many of them felt lonely. Almost every hand went up. Ryan and Daniel take that idea apart and land somewhere uncomfortable: burnout is not caused by work. It's caused by a lack of connection. Which means most of what companies do about burnout is water for a hunger problem.

In this episode:

• Why you can grind 60-hour weeks with a team and feel energized, then grind 40 alone and feel destroyed
• The loneliness math: one in five lonely at work, 13% of Americans living alone, and what that adds up to across the workforce
• Whether you should actually make friends at work, and what happens when your friend has to hold you accountable
• The manager who could recite every KPI on their team and had never once asked anyone how they were doing
• Why a family trying to give you space can make the loneliness worse, not better
• How four generations in one workforce experience loneliness completely differently

00:00 — Simon Sinek's Loneliness Bomb (and All Those Raised Hands)

02:00 — "Burnout Is Not Caused by Work. It's Caused by a Lack of Connection."

07:00 — One in Five, Living Alone, and the Loneliness Math Nobody Runs

14:00 — Spicy Take: Should You Actually Make Friends at Work?

24:00 — The Turnaround Nobody at Home Could Understand

31:00 — Diversify Your Friend Portfolio (and Other Things to Do Monday)

36:00 — Leadership Is Not a Title

RYAN: Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast. I found this really interesting clip from Simon Sinek, and I'd love to discuss it with you. Let's play it.

[CLIP — Simon Sinek]

SIMON SINEK: I'm feeling burnt out. It must be because of my job. It must be because of my boss. It must be because of my career, right? It makes sense. It's where I feel it. But perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it's a sense of loneliness.

Didi Halfhill came on the podcast and explained this to me, and it was amazing. She was in the military, and she's got her troops. There was an issue with burnout. People were exhausted. They were struggling, and they all said, "I'm burnt out," and they didn't know what to do. There was nothing they could do, because the op tempo was intense and it wasn't slowing down.

So what's a leader supposed to do when the team says, "I'm burnt out and I can't keep up"? She simply asked the room, "How many of you are feeling lonely?" And the number of hands that went up was astonishing. She realized it wasn't the op tempo. It was the sense of loneliness that was giving the feeling of burnout and the feeling of overwhelm.

The way she dealt with people's burnout was not by giving them vacations or giving them days off. What she did was the hard work of helping them not feel alone — checking in with them as human beings. And I think people's burnout started to subside when somebody was doing the hard work of making sure they knew that they weren't alone in this world.

[END CLIP]

DANIEL: Okay, that's an interesting viewpoint. When I first read it — "Could loneliness, not workload, be fueling burnout?" — my reaction was, surely people aren't lonely. Married couples, people with personal lives. I wasn't feeling the loneliness part until I watched the video and understood what he's talking about. There are absolutely lonely people. But I think it's more than that. It's that you're lonely in your job.

RYAN: Well, I like this. I think burnout's not caused by work. Burnout is caused by a lack of connection. And that lack of connection can be in your personal life. It certainly is at work in a lot of places. But I wonder if that lack of connection is actually the key to addressing burnout.

DANIEL: You just said it right there. It's not loneliness. It's not workload. It's disconnection. How'd you say that? "Burnout is not caused by work. Burnout is caused by a lack of connection." You nailed it. Because we're all willing to grind away and work hard when we know we're working toward something meaningful. We're in it together. We're working toward a common goal. It's when the daily grind is by yourself.

And even as I'm saying this, it makes me think — I bet there are people who are married, maybe they have kids, but the workload is so much that it's creating a sense of loneliness. Their spouse is taking care of the family and thinking, "We don't want to bother you, we know you're busy with work." Work is overloading you. So you probably do have married people, people with partners, experiencing a level of loneliness connected to it. That's a very interesting thought. I'm interested to dig into this topic today.

RYAN: Absolutely. So you're not overworked. You're under-connected. Have you ever been in a situation where you and the team were grinding away, but you didn't feel burned out?

DANIEL: Oh yeah. There's a whole psychology around shared suffering. When a team goes through something together, it makes them stronger individually and as a team. But they have to face adversity and overcome it. I've been in lots of situations, both professionally and personally, where we had a tough assignment, and rather than breaking us, it built us stronger together. It almost feels energizing as opposed to defeating. But I know you've had both, right? I'm sure you've been in situations where it felt more defeating.

RYAN: Oh, absolutely. Some of these turnarounds where the team goes into self-preservation mode, and then it just becomes silos, politics, and turf wars. And those aren't only defeating — I'm self-reflecting here on the loneliness side of it. My wife couldn't understand what I was going through. She was trying to be supportive, but she's not in the day-to-day. The team is in complete disarray. That has a hundred percent led to burnout in those situations.

And it's crazy — in that video, he talks about how the leader took the time to do it. I think that's where a lot of it comes down to the whole red line versus green line. The leader takes the time to do the hard work. They're in the trenches too. They're probably stressed and overloaded, but they're being intentional about it. I think that's the key right there. Because it's easy to go: my silo, my department, my project. "Well, if I just double down on this, I'll get through to the other side." But you did it alone, so you probably burned yourself out.

DANIEL: Yeah. And even if you get through the work and you get through that season, it doesn't address the underlying problem. It reminds me of one of the hacks for losing weight: when you're hungry, drink water. Curing burnout with vacation is like treating hunger with water. It'll make you feel better for a little bit, but eventually you're going to have to deal with the real problem.

RYAN: Don't get me wrong, that's not a knock on vacation in general. But vacation in the middle of burnout, unless it's done correctly, is just sweeping the problem under the rug. You may get refueled a little bit. You may get connection with family and friends because you went on vacation, and you kind of fixed some of the loneliness, as we're using it here.

DANIEL: Right. Reconnected.

RYAN: Yeah. And then you're right back in the job, right back in the lonely tunnel.

DANIEL: You're back down in the hole by yourself again, which I think is even more dangerous.

RYAN: Oh, I agree. Disengaged.

DANIEL: It just cascades downward. Gallup says something like one in five employees is now lonely at work. And I believe it's 30% of US households that are single-parent households — so they might have kids, but they don't have a spouse or a partner. And I just looked this up: 13% of Americans live alone. So there's a significant demographic whose primary social interaction is work.

If you're lonely in your personal life and you go to work looking for connection — wow. That's a bad spot to be in, because there are a lot of terrible workplaces out there. And if that's your social time, that is not good for your mental and emotional health.

RYAN: That's a whole other topic, but I want to layer those stats for a second. You said one in five Americans are feeling lonely at work, so that's 20%. Then 30% single-parent households. And what was the other stat?

DANIEL: 13% of Americans live alone.

RYAN: Okay. And living alone is strictly by themselves?

DANIEL: Yeah. Solo. No kids, no spouse, no partner, no roommate. Just me.

RYAN: So let's layer that together. You've got 30% single, 13% living alone — so we're at 43%. Half of those people, statistically, using the one-in-five number, are lonely in their job. And if you take those percentages out to the mass — that's millions of people. What did we say on the previous episode? 161 million working Americans?

DANIEL: Yep, something like that.

RYAN: So 20% of 160 million — that's 32 million. That's a lot of people.

DANIEL: That's a lot of people. That's costing billions of dollars. So here's an interesting question. If loneliness is actually what's driving burnout, why do we keep treating the symptoms and not the root cause?

RYAN: That's easy, Bob. Because the red line is always the easiest option in front of you. It always looks like the easier option. It is the easy option in front of you.

DANIEL: It's the consequence of that you're glossing over, right? So remind me of the red line, green line again.

RYAN: All right. Red line is when the decision in front of you has a perceived high value. It looks like it's the solution. But as time goes on, it catches up to you, because you hit the easy button, you half-assed it — pick your analogy. The actual outcome is a lower actual value over time. I chose to drink and drive. Eventually you're going to wreck, get caught, get a ticket.

DANIEL: Sounded fun at the time.

RYAN: Right. Catches up with you in the long run.

DANIEL: Or: I'd rather go buy a new car today than invest that money into some conservative investment vehicle so that 30 years from now I can buy that car with cash. I bought it on credit.

RYAN: Because you wanted it now, right? So then the green line approach is when you take the time to think it through, do the hard work, do the planning, do the prepping, say no to the right things. The actual value on the other side is much higher than the perceived value of the original solution. But because it's hard, and you have to be diligent and disciplined to do it, we often look at that and say, "Well, that's the hard route. Let's take the easy route, because easy solves the problem today."

DANIEL: Right. The stereotypical "I'll quit smoking tomorrow because I want one today." And 20 years later you wonder why you have lung cancer.

Maybe said a different way, it's immediate gratification versus long-term gratification. Doing the hard work to play the longer-term game is hard. That's one of the definitions of maturity — forgoing what I want right now for what I really want later. But most of us don't do that in our personal life or our professional life. So we just take another vacation instead of actually building a friendship. Is that how it applies here?

RYAN: Well, human connections are hard. It's hard to make friends. And keep in mind there's a dichotomy here. I don't know if we want to get into this debate now, but — should you make friends at work?

DANIEL: Ooh.

RYAN: That's a dicey one. In some ways yes, in some ways no. And this is where toxic environments come in. Someone makes a friendship, especially with a boss, and then the business says, "I need you to hold this person accountable." Now your boss is your friend. Do I sacrifice my friendship, or do I be a good boss to the company? I don't know what the statistic is, but I'm going to say more often than not, the boss will favor the human connection, because we value that — as opposed to loyalty to the company. And of course, if you do choose loyalty to the company, you're seen as corporate and heartless.

DANIEL: So I think there's a healthy balance for sure. I don't think there's anything wrong with being friends with coworkers. But I do think if you're trying to solve your loneliness problem through work, that might itself be part of the problem.

RYAN: I'd agree. I think that's a dangerous strategy. It might work, but if it doesn't, it's going to blow up.

But let's segment out that group of people who are truly living on their own, or single parents, who basically only have time to work and take care of their family. That may be the only avenue. I get that. Let's set that aside for a second, because I think there's another group — and I don't know the percentage — where they have a family at home. Let's use a husband and wife as the example. The wife might stay home, or she might have a more flexible job, and she takes care of the kids. The kids are in school. And you've got dad, stressed out at work, overloaded. The family is trying to be respectful: "We don't want to bother you, we know you're busy, we know you work hard." And so you get this loneliness. My family's trying to give me space so I can get my work done. My work has me operating in a silo. I think that's just as dangerous as the person who lives alone.

DANIEL: Yeah. Or more dangerous, because you've got it from both sides.

I've got one maybe even worse than that. I remember working with somebody very successful in their career. They had a spouse. I don't think they had kids at home. But their attitude was, "You know what? I'm good at work. I'm not good at family. So I'm just going to stick with what I'm good at." And so they were working 60, 70 hours a week. They'd come into the office on Saturdays. They were pretty much avoiding their family to work.

Loneliness becomes a really big problem there. Like you said — if something happens at the company, your friend's gone, your friend's now your boss, you get let go, whatever those dynamics are. Pinning all of your emotional and relational connections to your job is a very dangerous strategy.

RYAN: Agree. And let's use the husband and wife example again. What's probably going to happen is they're going to feel burned out at work, come home looking for companionship, and it might be one of those, "Well, you've been busy" conversations. It starts a fight. Now you've got disruption at home and friction at work, and it just leads to discontent and disengagement. I don't know what the statistic is, but that has definitely led to divorces in America.

DANIEL: Absolutely it has.

RYAN: I don't think this is a new problem. I think it's a compounding problem. And it's gotten worse with the adversity in the economy and the way things have been the past 15, 20 years.

DANIEL: Yeah. All right, let's dig a little deeper. Is it really loneliness, or is it a crappy boss that's making you burnt out?

RYAN: Both. Actually, I'm going to say crappy boss — and I'm going to say the crappy boss is leading to the loneliness. It goes back to exactly what Simon said in the video: the boss took the time and energy to check in with their people.

Remember, this was the whole thing behind Orcor. We were getting that data and we were seeing people with low happiness scores, and we'd go to the manager and say, "Hey, have you checked in on this?" "Oh yeah, yeah, they're chugging away on the projects. They're good on their rocks. They're hitting the KPIs." And I'd say, "No, no, no. Have you actually asked how they're doing?" "Oh. Well, no, I haven't." "Hey, they were at like 30% happiness this week. Do you think you should ask how they're doing?" "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

A good manager doesn't need a tool to make sure their people are happy. A decent manager can use a tool. A bad manager just ignores it.

DANIEL: Yeah. I think there's something about the fact that we're more than just workers. We are workers — we've got a job, most of us have a job. Honestly, I think we all need a job to some extent, because when you look at people who have nothing to do, they tend to be very unhappy. Most people need something productive to do to stay happy. But if you only work, if that's all you are, you're a one-dimensional creature, a productivity machine. That doesn't work either.

Good bosses understand that you're a human, you have interests, you have people you care about, and you are more than your KPIs. But I don't think that's valued in a lot of organizational cultures. There's this idea that the good managers are the ones who drive the best KPIs. I don't think so. I think the best managers are the ones who treat their people like people and are able to get good results — but they're not doing it at the expense of the people who work for them. That's a hard balance to find, and it's not something we train a lot of people to do well.

RYAN: I think we can take this a couple of different directions, because what I just said was very targeted. There's a level of — and I'm going to throw some shade on the boomers here — the grinders. They're looking for the KPIs, the results. They own a lot of the small businesses right now, and they don't care how it gets done, they just want the results. And then you get managers who are forced to be in the weeds doing tactical work because they're not hitting the budget number. The KPI is more important than anything else. We want higher profits more than a better company. So you've got managers who I would say are forced into being bad managers for their own livelihood's sake. Can you really call that person a bad manager, or is it the environment that created the bad manager?

DANIEL: Is it the loneliness, or is it the hours? Can you do 60-plus hour weeks and not get burned out?

RYAN: Yes, you totally can — especially if you love your job and you love what you're doing. But then you're probably not having this problem.

There's a level here that's the EQ side of the equation. I think the younger generation versus the older generation is the dynamic and the shift we're seeing. There's technology coming into it, where we've become so much more IQ-focused. There are a lot of components behind it. But I don't think it's the hours. If you love what you do, it'll be your hobby. You'll find enjoyment in it. And if you're doing it with others, you'll have the human connection. It's when the work creates isolation. When the micromanager is shoving you into a hole. When your work is the only thing you have going for you in life and the rest of your life sucks.

DANIEL: Right. Or we don't even acknowledge that anything else exists outside of the office.

RYAN: Right. So I think where Simon was taking that video is that loneliness is probably part of the root cause that leads to burnout. Let's just say this categorically: I don't think burnout is the root cause. Burnout is the result of a root cause.

DANIEL: Burnout's the symptom?

RYAN: Burnout's the symptom. And loneliness is one of the key root causes of burnout.

DANIEL: So it makes me think about vision, journey, culture, results on an individual basis. We talk a lot about that for organizations. But if you take a personalized version of it, you could map it to a spiritual, mental, emotional, physical wheel.

If work is mental — that's the component. It's all work, not tied to anything spiritual. There's no purpose here. You're not making the world a better place. So you've got nothing on the spiritual axis, tons on the mental axis, very little on the emotional and relational axis, and it comes at the expense of the physical. And we wonder why it's not working. Why everyone's overweight and has high cholesterol and is miserable and doesn't have friends.

I wonder if we could go back to vision, journey, culture, results and say that even at an individual level, you've got to have your vision, your journey, your culture, your results. You've got to know spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically how to take care of yourself. Because if you don't, and you double down on any one of those axes, you're going to end up in an unhealthy place.

RYAN: A thousand percent. Like you said, you've got to have balance to the whole thing. And the red line is when you go from vision straight to result at the expense of journey and culture. I think that's what a lot of people are doing in this case. They have the idea: if I just grind harder, if I just get to this result, if I just hit this KPI, then it'll solve all my problems. But in reality, it's the definition of insanity — you're doing the same thing over and over with a perceived high value, and all you're doing is destroying yourself on the other side.

DANIEL: What about introverts? What about people who work better by themselves, in quiet, able to think?

RYAN: It's interesting. We've talked about introverts versus extroverts, and yes, there's a definition for a reason. But introverts are more extroverted than they lead themselves to believe, in the right setting with the right group. There are extremes to every exception — let's say 20% on either side are way out on the extremes, but most people are going to be somewhere in the middle, just on one side of the fence or the other.

Yes, introverts like their space to work. They're not chatty and gossipy and wanting to be in everybody's business. They just want to do their work. But they're usually highly collaborative people. They want to work with people. It's not that they're antisocial — don't get me wrong, there are disorders and things like that, but that's not what we're talking about here. They're just not there to shoot the shit about stuff that isn't important. That doesn't mean they don't value human connection.

That could also get misconstrued: "Oh, they're introverted, keep them excluded." That's red line. You're not thinking about what this person wants to be included in, what this person needs to be included in. You just decide, "Well, they're introverted, so we're not going to bother." Which goes back to Simon Sinek's point — a good manager would recognize that and would check in appropriately.

Here's another example. An extroverted person probably doesn't have a problem in a group setting with, "Hey, I saw your score was low, how are you doing?" An introverted person — that would probably freak them out. So a good manager knows their people. In a one-on-one, or a DM: "Hey, I noticed your score was a little lower. I noticed something's a little off. How are you doing?" It doesn't mean they don't want to communicate with you. They just don't want to do it publicly in a group. So a good manager adjusts accordingly.

DANIEL: Yeah. Extroverts love getting everybody in a room for a brainstorming session, which is an introvert's worst nightmare.

RYAN: I don't know. You give them veto power and status, and they'll sit in that room very quiet until a strategic moment and just go, "I object."

DANIEL: Right. And then drop some knowledge on everyone.

RYAN: Exactly.

DANIEL: So let's talk about this idea of isolation at work. It's probably been a problem for a while, but as I think about COVID and how isolating that was for everyone, it took the whole issue up a level. What can companies do to combat this epidemic of isolation?

RYAN: In a previous episode we talked about organizations investing in leadership and management development, and how that's seen as a wasted expense that no one invests in. I think that's one of the first things you can do — invest in your leaders. The other thing is to understand how to support your leaders, not squeeze your leaders. Because when you're squeezing them, it all rolls downhill.

DANIEL: Yeah, it does. I hate to keep going back to this, but I do wonder if there's something here in vision, journey, culture, results. Leaders, particularly the most senior leaders in an organization, need to help people connect the dots. Why are we here? What needs to be done? And then that relational connection — checking in on people. "Hey, not work stuff. How was your weekend? What was the best part? What's something you've done recently that you really enjoyed? When's your next vacation? Where are you going?" Actually treating people like humans, and doing that before we get to the results, as opposed to just beating people up for results.

I bet you that would create a much healthier culture and reduce burnout significantly. If there was purpose, if there was clear alignment from the purpose to the activities, if there were good emotional connections and strong core values — and we did all of that before we started talking about net operating profit — I bet that would solve a lot of the burnout.

RYAN: I agree. It's funny, I was talking to someone earlier today about this. You get leadership teams that work like five-year-olds playing soccer, clumping around the ball. It means we clearly don't understand the vision and we don't understand how to play our positions. Then you've got groups that think they're playing their positions, but all they've really done is shove people into a spot: "You stand here and don't move, and only touch the ball when it comes back to you."

DANIEL: Control.

RYAN: Right. And that's exactly what you're saying — go back to the vision. Without a clear vision, you create a very wide spectrum of where work can get done. Then you end up in silos, because the work is so spread out, or the departments are focused on totally different initiatives, and you don't have alignment through the business. Use our lovely BS-generator word: synergy. Because you don't have that connection through the business, because the vision isn't clear, it creates departmental silos. And then there's a rush to compensate for that with results and KPIs, which creates individual silos.

You're absolutely right. Go all the way back to the vision and get everybody on the same page. Because as you and I both know, if you've got a clear vision, a clear journey, and you've identified what you want your culture to be, the results take care of themselves.

DANIEL: I'd say not just a clear vision — a compelling vision. I've worked at places where the vision statement was "maximize shareholder returns," and nobody cares.

RYAN: Well, that's all Fortune 500 companies. Let's just be honest.

DANIEL: It was a Fortune 500 company. I'm not going to name names, but that was the vision statement. And I remember talking with my coworkers and saying, "If I'm awesome at my job, the hedge fund managers get a bigger bonus. How am I really helping the world become a better place?" It was hard. A lot of people struggled with burnout there, and I think some of it is because there just wasn't any purpose tied to their work.

RYAN: And let's remember, only one third of America is employed by Fortune 500.

DANIEL: That's true. It's a lot of people when you're in it, but you're right.

RYAN: It is a lot of people when you're in it. And there are benefits and perks that come with that. Let's be honest, most of the burnout is not happening in Fortune 500. Don't hear me wrong — there is burnout there. But I'd guarantee you it's ten to one, small business to Fortune 500.

DANIEL: Really?

RYAN: In Fortune 500 there's a lot more expectation around nine-to-five, benefits, insurance packages. There's a lot more corporate-defined structure. You see it all the time when an executive comes from Fortune 500 into small business and expects an army of people to do all the work. They don't understand it, because they came from the big machine. I'm not saying there's no burnout in those companies — there is. But it's totally different. I guarantee you've got access to a better healthcare system, a better vacation policy, a better retirement package, and perks.

And I think it comes back down to what you said earlier: your personal vision. Some of the most cutthroat environments are private equity and investment banking — grinding the hell out of people, especially the junior guys right out of college. I'm not saying if it's not for you, don't do it. But there's a level of, what's your tolerance? Grind, get the experience, do it for two years, know your limits, take your vacations to maintain it, get your experience, and then move that to something else you really want to do.

DANIEL: Yeah. I think where a lot of this burnout is happening is in the small business space. It's because the companies are just big enough to do well, but they're not big enough to have support systems, backup, extra people in the roles.

And this is a more recent one — when you've got Meta laying off 10,000 people and Microsoft laying off 10,000 people.

RYAN: Amazon saying they're going to do the same. But that goes back to what we said: all publicly traded companies exist to show the shareholders, so they're going to squeeze. And we know the cycle. Work sucks for three, six, nine months. After they get past that reporting period, they'll hire people back up. It's a reciprocal cycle, but you've got your benefits going on with it.

You just have to know what you're signing up for. There is no perfect scenario. There is no perfect job. Everything comes with concession. Everything comes with compromise.

DANIEL: That's the price of freedom, right?

RYAN: Unfortunately. But the great thing is we get the power of choice. So go back to your original point: choose the vision you're trying to achieve for yourself, outline the journey you want to have, identify the culture and the people you want to be around, to produce the results you want for your life. And if your current situation isn't doing that, figure out how you can get there — ask friends, ask family, ask mentors. Because you don't deserve to be lonely in your job, and you don't deserve to be burned out.

DANIEL: Yeah. Change the equation. I'd also encourage people to think about the bigger equation, not just the work equation. Work is a piece that should fit into your life. You don't fit your life into the cracks that are left over after work is done. You need to architect all of that and make those trade-off decisions intentionally.

If you want to work 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, that is a choice. You're welcome to do that. Just understand it comes with some trade-offs, and be honest with yourself about them. You're not going to make your kid's T-ball games if you're consistently working 60-hour weeks. It just isn't going to happen.

RYAN: And what's our greatest resource that we can never get back?

DANIEL: Time.

RYAN: Time. So you miss that ball game. Next game. Next game. That season. Next season. And your kid's 18 and off to college. You don't get those years back.

DANIEL: I read somewhere that 80% of the time you get to spend with your kid is between zero and 18. And for the rest of their life, it's the remaining 20% spread over 50-plus years.

RYAN: I absolutely believe it. The math seems to check out.

DANIEL: All right, I've got to get back to loneliness. Here's one. How about managers who aren't dialed into their team's emotional state? They don't realize their people feel lonely until somebody quits, and then everything falls apart because there aren't enough hands to do all the work.

RYAN: Yes. And the question is, are they legitimately a bad manager? Or are they a person in the wrong box — right person, wrong seat — which makes them a bad manager? What I see, and this is very stereotypical in the small business space, is they promote someone and don't train them for the box. They put them in the box before they're trained, and figure they'll learn along the way.

DANIEL: By today's standards, they're not a good manager. Maybe they're capable of it.

RYAN: Right.

DANIEL: But it's going to take six months to a year for them to get the soft skills, and what damage gets done in between?

RYAN: Yeah. So you literally set them up for failure — which maybe makes you the bad manager for making that management decision.

DANIEL: You're also creating really bad situations for yourself and the rest of your team. Because if you don't have that relational connection with your team members, you're not going to know if they're not happy. They're not going to tell you until they resign. And then you're screwed, because it's too late. So I think it's critically important for managers, even in unhealthy cultures, to get a feel for how their people are really doing outside of work.

How would you think about this generationally? You mentioned boomers a little bit ago, focusing on the results and continuing to grind. But we've got four generations now in the workforce — boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z. How do they think about loneliness in the workplace?

RYAN: I think if we go from the younger generation to the older generation, the younger generation is more publicly aware and more verbal about it. As you get to the older generations — and this is stuff I get from my parents, who are boomers — they grew up in "suck it up, don't cry, life is hard, it is what it is." So there may be less public awareness of it. They just suck it up and grind through it, or they accept it as the norm.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think they probably had lower expectations to begin with of what relational connection meant. Being in the office — remote work wasn't a thing for the majority of the boomers' working careers. If you were in the office, you were seeing people. What are you complaining about?

But I do think Gen Z has this digital-first relational framework, where they're very comfortable building relationships with people they're never actually in physical proximity with. In some sense it may be easier for Gen Z to build those relationships in the workplace as it exists today, which is more fragmented, more distributed. But they also have higher expectations of those relationships. So it's easier for them, but the bar's higher. And that's going to create a lot of challenges for employers, because you've got these Gen Z workers coming in who want to have a bunch of friends but might not want to put in the grind.

RYAN: I'd be curious — I want to ask some of my Gen Z employees to get their weigh-in on this. I think as you go from younger to older, and I think this goes with age and technology, the younger generation is so blended between work and life.

DANIEL: Very fluid.

RYAN: Because it's so interconnected. You could be texting a coworker, then a friend, then a random person, in seconds. Whereas go back to the '80s and that wasn't the case. The older generations had a very hard work-life separation. It just got less separated as you get to the younger generations. Even the millennials — we were the ones known for balancing work and life in real time. We'd balance it on the fly. And Gen Z is an evolution of that. That's why I say Gen Z is more vocal about it: it's more real time, versus the older generations being more black-and-white, hard-line split.

DANIEL: So then why are millennials reporting the highest levels of burnout?

RYAN: Because we're the ones just below the top of the organization. Our boss is a boomer who values the results, and we've been siloed and overwhelmed. Don't worry. We'll take over the world soon enough. Just give us a few more years.

DANIEL: All right. And Gen Xers — latchkey kids. We were used to being alone anyway. That was just normal, because our parents were boomers.

RYAN: Your parents were the generation before that, right? I'm a young Gen X — I'm almost Gen Y. So my parents were probably older boomers. Technically I think my mom is a boomer, and my dad and stepmom are boomers. And yours are the generation before that.

DANIEL: The greatest generation.

RYAN: The greatest generation. Yeah. It's funny — was this on the recording we had the other day, or was it just a conversation? My mom was here and she said, "Do you remember that commercial that used to come on every night at ten o'clock, right before the news? 'It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?'" And we started talking about why they did that. Then we found this YouTube video that was like, did people just go, "Shit! Where are our kids?"

DANIEL: "Haven't seen my kid in six hours."

RYAN: Yeah, because the Gen Xers were just like — where the hell are they?

DANIEL: Oh yeah. That was my childhood. Especially in the summer, I would leave at eight in the morning, get on my bike, and I was gone. I'd come back for lunch. And then the rule was be home when the streetlights come on. There was no telling whose house I was at, playing video games or baseball or soccer or just doing anything in the neighborhood. We were gone all the time.

So I don't see the expectation that somebody's going to fix this for me — that somebody else is going to help me with my loneliness — in a lot of Gen Xers. I think Gen Xers are more of a "this is what you make it." And we're not here to grind forever like the boomers, but this also isn't Disneyland. Some of it's going to suck, because if it didn't, they wouldn't have to pay you to be here. So let's just admit what it is. Find your friends where you can, get your work done, and then move along to whatever it is you want to do with the rest of your time.

RYAN: I want to throw one last perspective on the generations before we wrap up here. If you go back several generations, you really had the corporate ladder. You started at the bottom and you climbed as you got older, as you progressed. I'm not saying there weren't anomalies, but typically you didn't have a 25-year-old skipping two rungs on the ladder. You had the working class, you had the educated class, and you climbed the ladders. If you went into management, or you came out of college with a management degree versus coming out with trade skills — kind of like the military, you had different ladders you climbed. And you always just had the older generation above you and the younger generation below.

Since this paradigm shift with technology, you have boomers and Gen X reporting to millennials now. And in some cases there may be a Gen Z in there. So you've flipped it all upside down. And each generation has had its own support structure. If you think about lifetime — a 20-year-old coming out of college doesn't have kids, doesn't have a house or a family. Then you get into your 30s. Then you get into your 50s and 60s and you've got grandchildren.

DANIEL: Stage of life.

RYAN: That's what I'm getting at. Life stage. Now you've got people at management, VP, director, and senior levels at various stages of life. That in itself has got to be creating disruption. You've got an individual who wants to grind away and advance their career, in a VP role, upper 20s or low 30s, maybe has a spouse or partner, no kids yet. And their peer is someone who's 45 with two young kids at home. That's a totally different lifestyle.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think that's true. I think the other force intersecting that and accelerating it is the in-real-life versus digital-virtual dynamic. Boomers didn't have to deal with the virtual world. As long as you were in the office, you were in community. Gen Z now has lots of digital relationships but is potentially lonely in real life, because they don't have those people physically around them — either they're working remotely or they just don't have any of those relationships at work. So you've got this additional complexity of, where are your people? Are they around you physically in real life, or are they digitally connected to you? There are pros and cons with both, and that's adding a lot of complexity to the loneliness equation as well.

RYAN: I agree. So let's begin to wrap it up. What can we do about this? Let's go backwards. Let's start with frontline employees — let's say for the sake of argument they tend to be in the younger generations, Gen Z and millennials.

DANIEL: My first recommendation would be that you need to have some good relationships at work, but don't put all your eggs in that basket. If you have no relationships at work, no friends at work, that's a bad thing. But if all of your friends are at work, that is also a bad thing. So you need to diversify your friend portfolio. Have a few at work, and make sure you have some friends outside of work as well.

And understand that those relationships may require some different skills than the ones you developed digitally, especially if you're going to be making friends with people in other generations. Maybe actually going out to lunch in real life is a good idea instead of just tweeting at each other.

RYAN: It's really hard to give advice on this one, because we could literally never stop recording for the next ten years and still not cover all the possible scenarios. But the bottom line — and you said it very well — is align your personal vision, journey, culture, and results to get what's going to work for you. There are infinite versions of success out there. If you're in this situation, step back, figure out what success looks like for you, what you realistically want, and go the green line. Don't look for the easy button, because there's no such thing as free in life. We all know that. Step back, reevaluate, reassess, and make the changes.

If you're a business owner, you need to do the same thing for your business, and you need to empower your managers. You need to lead your managers to be better managers, and it will result in a better outcome.

DANIEL: I don't think there's any one thing anybody can do. Everybody needs to own their part. If you're an individual employee, you're in control of your own destiny. If you're the manager, you've got to step up your management game. Management's hard, but it can be very rewarding when you do it right. It's not rewarding when you do it wrong — it's very stressful, it sucks. And if you hate management and you're in a management role, maybe look for something else.

RYAN: And if you're an employee and you want to move into management, it's time to start shuffling the deck.

DANIEL: I'd agree. It's going to take millions of people taking a step forward to solve this problem. It's a very complicated problem, and I think it's going to get worse. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, but I think AI makes this harder. There's going to be a lot of shuffling in the workforce. A lot of jobs are going to be eliminated and new jobs created. So there's going to be a lot of turnover. We don't really know what all the consequences of AI are going to be, but I don't think it's going to make people feel more connected to one another.

If Simon Sinek is right — and I think there's definitely some truth to what he said — burnout is as much about the connections you have as it is the hours you work. So rather than trying to reduce your hours, look at that relational axis. Who are the people you actually feel like you have a good relationship with, who are friends, who care about you as a human being? Leaning into those relationships might be a better cure for burnout than extra vacation days.

What about for the different generations? What recommendations would you have for them?

RYAN: Generational views shape how connection is experienced and what's needed. So it's about using the strengths of the different generations around you. Older generations are probably better for mentoring and asking for guidance. Younger generations, for mentoring down and helping and assisting. Parallel generation — peer to peer, iron sharpens iron. Using the generational differences for mutual gain can change the connections you make.

DANIEL: I like that. And the other thing I'd call back to is that this is complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. This is a system dynamic. There's not just one thing you're going to fix here, or one person who can fix this. This is a lot of people fixing a lot of things at the same time that's going to make it better. Vision, journey, culture, results can guide that system approach and say, okay, let's make sure all of these pieces are coming together. That's really a leadership responsibility, but everybody else has to play their part as well.

RYAN: One final takeaway. Yes, there are titles that are leadership-level, and you're expected to have leadership qualities. But leadership is not a title. If you see somebody having a bad day, check in with them. Follow through with it. That is leadership. Leadership is taking the intentional steps forward to better yourself and taking others along the journey with you, or bettering them. It's about leading. You don't have to be in a leadership or management position to lead others. And that's how you can make work not suck.

DANIEL: Exactly. So think of one system in your workplace that isolates people — one tiny structural change you could shift next week that would reduce loneliness. Whether you're a leader, whether you're a manager, or whether you're just the average, everyday employee, everybody has the capability of being a leader and making sure loneliness doesn't exist in the workplace.

[END OF EPISODE]