Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Maslach's research is that burnout isn't necessarily a result of overwork. It can be, certainly. Michael Leiter, a lovely Canadian fellow and frequent collaborator of Maslach's, has elegantly called burnout a "crisis in self-efficacy," which to me suggests that head-banging feeling of struggling mightily for too little or (worse) nothing in return. Ayala Pines, a researcher in Israel who’s looked at burnout in all sorts of inspired contexts (including marriage), rather heartbreakingly sums up the problem as "the failure of the existential quest"-that moment when we wake up one morning and realize that what we're doing has appallingly little value. She studied the insurance business, for example, a profession often associated with the ultimate cubicle tedium. Yet she noticed something very interesting. "The ones who had some traumatic experience related to insurance when they were children-their house burned down or whatever-they can work for a long time without burning out," she says. "Because they came to the profession with a calling. They feel their work is significant."

And Farber often calls burnout "the gap between expectation and reward," which may have the most relevance to New Yorkers. This has always been a city of inflated expectations. People with more modest aims for themselves seem less prone to disillusionment.