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The Burnout of Never Feeling Good Enough at Work
Description
Lucas and Luna explore how the relentless pursuit of 'enough' — enough achievement, enough recognition, enough output — fuels chronic workplace exhaustion. They anchor the episode in a 2025 study from the University of Cambridge's Wellbeing Research Centre, which found that professionals who set 'satisficing' goals (aiming for 'good enough' rather than 'optimal') reported 34% lower emotional exhaustion scores over 18 months. The hosts discuss why the modern workplace incentivizes never-enough thinking, how it shows up in daily habits like over-revising emails and volunteering for extra projects, and what practical switches — from time-boxing decisions to defining 'done' before you start — actually help. Luna pushes Lucas on whether this advice works for people in high-stakes roles like emergency medicine or teaching, and Lucas walks through a specific reframe from one of his former colleagues in nursing. The episode ends with a forward-looking question about whether the next decade of work might shift from 'more' to 'enough' as a sustainability metric.