ArcaMax

They call it "rust-out."

It's what happens to hard-working, career-oriented people just like you -- right before you hit burnout. If it isn't worrying you right now, you're the only one, because rust-out is in.

Don't believe me? Pry open your rusted-shut eyes and take a gander at "Rust-out Is the New Burnout, and It Requires a Different Fix," a recent Peter H. Bailey joint in Fast Company.

You remember burnout, of course.

Burnout is when you hit the wall. You've worked so hard so long that you can't work at all. You're useless to your company and useless to yourself. Career-wise, it's the end of the road, unless you're a high-level manager and then you're set for life.

Rust-out isn't like that.

According to Bailey, rust-out "leaves people feeling understimulated, disconnected and going through the motions." You still do your work as you quietly coagulate in place, but you make it hard on everyone, especially yourself. Whatever is required, creaky old you does the absolute minimum and you do it at the slowest, possible speed.

Rusted-out, you are the epitome of "low energy, apathy, half-hearted contributions." (If you can finagle it, you work from home, where you endeavor to work from bed. In the final stages of rust-out, you work from under the bed.)

All of which raises the question -- is rust-out bad, or what?

According to management experts, rust-out is very bad, indeed. It's a condition that must be treated -- stat! The solution is a career Rust-oleum applied immediately, lubricating emotional joints and allowing the worker to return to unfrozen levels of productivity. This is critical maintenance work that can only be handled by human resources professionals.

Scarily, the rust treatment HR prescribes requires extracting rust-bound workers from their cozy hidey-holes and putting them in situations where they not only risk their careers, but also their lives. Reader, we're talking "corporate adventure training." That's when the marketing people you find so difficult to work with on the simplest projects suddenly have your life in their hands on a corporate ropes course. Or the IT nerds and nerdetts who can't find time to upgrade your laptop to last decade's operating system are side-by-side with you on a dogsled, mushing over vast ice fields toward a truly frozen eternity. Or you find yourself in a rubber raft, bobbing wildly on roaring rapids with a bunch of number crunchers from accounting, paddling for dear life -- your dear life.

Sound scary?

That's the whole idea. A hair-raising experience "breaks the rust and frees employees from the chains of their daily office routine."

"Rust-producing routine," like going to lunch and breathing.

I, for one, do not believe rust-out is a problem. In fact, from my admittedly rusty perch, rust-out is one of the most powerful strategies for people working in 2026, who would like to be people who are working in 2027 -- and beyond.

As a rusted-out employee, doing the bare minimum, you have the bare maximum chance of making career-ending mistakes. Better yet, as the rust builds up and your work product freezes up, you could become invisible to management. Yes, those low-energy, half-hearted contributions may not make you a superstar, but they will keep you off the radar of high-energy, whole-hearted VPs -- scared little rabbits who no longer worry about quotas in terms of products or profits but are now focused entirely on producing head-count reductions, quotas that reset upwards with every passing quarter.

Alas, as your output creaks to a stop, you may no longer have the skills required to avoid one of those rust-busting, team-building corporate adventure capers hatched by the weirdos in HR. If you find yourself wearing a helmet and strapped into a harness, dangling fifty feet in the air on a rope being held by a team member you wouldn't trust to turn on the coffee machine, you may have to do something dramatic, like letting go of the rope you are holding, letting your other teammates drop screaming into the roaring rapids below.

Now that's what I call team building.

Whether it is the dogsled adventure in which you mush your team into a bottomless crevasse or a zipline excursion in which you accidently zip into your biggest competitor at the office, knocking them off the platform and into the forest below, where they are eaten by ravenous weasels, an adventure outing can be an opportunity to eliminate threats to your career progress and position yourself for a rusted-out, work-free future.

In the meantime, happy rusting!

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Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at info@creators.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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