In Episode 47, certified health coach Noemie Mooney explains why nearly half of workers globally are burned out and why individual wellness fixes can't solve what's structurally broken at work, drawing on BCG's 2024 burnout research, Singapore Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon's "push factors versus pull factors" framing, and the concept of ethical fading from Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004).
In a 2024 survey, the Boston Consulting Group found that 48% of workers across eight countries are grappling with burnout, which means we’re well past the point of calling this an individual problem.
In this episode I unpack what Singapore’s Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon recently named at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025: people aren’t leaving careers because they’re being pulled to something better, they’re being pushed out by what work has become.
Favourite Line:
“Helping people cope with a broken system is not the same as changing the system that is breaking them. Both things have to happen at the same time.”
In This Episode
Why is workplace burnout structural rather than personal?
What is ethical fading and how does it degrade your judgement at work?
Why don’t wellness apps and resilience training actually fix burnout?
What are push factors versus pull factors when people leave their careers?
What did BCG’s 2024 burnout research find across eight countries?
Why does workplace culture stay broken even when leaders say they want change?
How do you tell the difference between coping and actually solving burnout?
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:17 Welcome from Rio
03:20 Push factors versus pull factors
05:13 BCG and the 48% statistic
06:10 What ethical fading really means
07:53 Why wellness apps fall short
10:45 What this means for you
Mentioned in This Episode
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Opening Address at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025 (Singapore, 29 July 2025)
Ethical fading, Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick, Social Justice Research (2004)
BCG, “Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout” (2024)
Your Experiment for This Week
Notice one workplace habit that your industry, your team, or your company treats as completely normal. Name it. Then ask yourself who that habit actually serves. Not the work, not the people, but the inherited idea of professionalism it might be propping up. You do not have to fix it. You just have to see it clearly for one week.
What is one workplace habit your industry treats as normal that is quietly making everyone exhausted?
Noemie x
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. She writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for people who are done with hustle culture and wellness BS.
