← Chapter 14
Applied Ethics · Chapter 14

Thirty-Six Months

Working adults are routinely told they are burned out and offered resilience training, and a wrong label sends help to the wrong address. Set the three drivers, switch interventions on and off, and scrub three years of a career. Watch the residue floor rise underneath each new episode — that is Epstein and Hamric's crescendo effect — and see which of the four injuries you are actually looking at.

The conditions you are putting someone in

Start from a preset
Three drivers, three different injuries
What the organisation does about it
Scrub the career
Month1
Month 1Month 36
Nothing random happens here. The same conditions, month after month, are exactly the point.

Three years, plotted

Thirty-six months of exhaustion, moral residue and moral injury A line chart. Vertical bars show each month's acute distress rising from the residue floor beneath it.
Moral residue (the floor) Acute distress this month Exhaustion Moral injury
Read this as a model, not a measurement. The shapes are honest to the literature — Maslach on burnout as an occupational syndrome of overload and low control, Jameton on distress as knowing the right course and being structurally prevented from taking it, Webster and Baylis on residue, Epstein and Hamric on the crescendo, Shay and Litz on injury — but no one has calibrated a curve like this against real people. The purpose is to make you argue with the label before you accept the treatment.