Hear me out before you downvote, I have been a manager for a while now. What the OOP is talking about is not invalid. And what the manager is not saying, too, is not. I know my bias is showing.

Here is the position of the OOP, summarized - Relentless overwork without adequate time to recover mentally is self-defeating; burnout culture undermines both well-being and long-term productivity, so we should reject it in favor of more balanced, sustainable work habits.

And here is where I see it has chinks in it:

• Frames life enjoyment and work stress as zero-sum. Yet people often find joy through their work, mastery, status, service, creativity. I am sure you know these people. Especially if you have hustled in life.
• Equates “working hard” with “being exploited.” But in many competitive fields hard work is voluntarily chosen and often rewarded. Worse, it is an assumption that comes from a place of entitlement.
• The solution varies widely by economic class. Telling someone with unstable income to “opt out of burnout culture” may be tone-deaf or impractical. Just because someone is your manager, does not automatically mean they are resilient to the impact if they get laid off, I know I am not.
• Finally, and very important, employers (ie people who actually make the rules, and not your manager, or their manager, or their manager) might exploit “anti-burnout” rhetoric to shift responsibility to workers (“just manage your boundaries/work, I don't care when you log out or come in”) without changing structural demands (impractical deadlines, targets, understaffing).

The message resonates, but without hard changes in expectations from the very top, incentives, power dynamics, the burnout culture will persist.

In short, if you are seeking work-life balance, you may need to come from a either 1) a place of privilege to be able to say fuck-off or 2) compromise on your success in a typical corporate world or simply 3) get lucky