III. AGAINST BURNOUT: DIAGNOSING MORAL INJURY

Burnout is the name we’ve given to our soul’s rebellion against misalignment. But the deeper truth is moral injury—when professionals, compelled by outdated business models, act in ways that betray their sense of duty, care, and craft.

We are not tired because we work hard. We are tired because we are asked to work in ways that violate our integrity.

Fee-for-service business models—ubiquitous, transactional, and disfiguring—strive to extract value rather than create it. They encourage compliance over creativity, volume over virtue. Under this model, the professional becomes a tool for billing hours or generating margin, not a steward of transformation. And when one must trade integrity for efficiency, compassion for expediency, and curiosity for commodification, the soul recoils. This is not fatigue. This is injury.

We reject the shallow remedies offered for burnout: longer vacations, shorter work weeks, and flextime. These are bandages. The wound is deeper. The wound is moral.

We assert that moral injury is the rightful diagnosis, and until it is named, no cure will follow. The cure is not rest alone, but restoration of purpose, of honor, of alignment between what we know is right and what we are asked to do. And that restoration demands a new model—one rooted in trust, value, and relationship. In transformation, not transaction.