The employees who never burn out? They slowly rust instead

Two months into his first job, Nivesh Sahu had a sheet of white paper taped to his desk—four or five lines, just in case his mind went blank mid-call. He was 23, had graduated with a literature degree from Delhi University, and spent his days reading those lines to 30 strangers.

The first few weeks came with butterflies. That's usually how it starts. But within two months, those butterflies had given way to monotony, the way most things do when you repeat them often enough, day after day.

Every commute after that, he cried a little on the inside. Not because the work was hard, but because he could already see the entire tunnel ahead—and every stretch of it looked exactly the same.

For years, burnout has dominated the conversation around work. It got the hashtags, the LinkedIn posts, and the sympathy of strangers who had never met you but somehow understood—too much work, too little time, and too little of yourself left at the end of the day. We built an entire vocabulary around it, and rightly so.

Burnout attracts attention because it is loud. People take leave, miss deadlines, or quit in a blaze of frustration that managers can document. Rust-out is different. The employee is still at the desk, still meeting targets, still logging in at 9:30 am. Nothing appears broken, so nobody notices.

But iron left idle in damp air doesn't need weight to rust—it corrodes simply because it is left unused.

The word is 50 years old. The feeling is brand new to you

The phrase “rusting out” first appeared in the 1970s, when John Howard used it in an article for Business Quarterly. He later expanded on the idea with colleagues in a 1978 text exploring stress among professionals. Researchers Walter H. Gmelch and Wilbert Chan applied the concept to schools in 1994.

The idea resurfaced in the popular press around 2023, largely through the work of British psychotherapist Paula Coles, who is widely credited with introducing it to a broader audience. Coles describes rust-out as the consequence of work that is uninspiring and insufficiently challenging, leading to disinterest, apathy, and alienation.

She contrasts rust-out with burnout. Burnout stems from excessive demands and chronic stress; rust-out, by contrast, develops when employees spend prolonged periods in environments that fail to stretch their abilities. Over time, that stagnation can turn into disengagement and emotional detachment.

Sociologist Sangita Johri has a way of explaining it that lingers long after the conversation ends. Burnout, she says, has always worn its symptoms on the outside—you don't need to search for it because it announces itself. Rust-out does the opposite. You have to look closely before it reveals itself.

In Johri's view, two forces are pulling it into the spotlight. The first is the economy. Years of uncertainty have pushed many people into jobs they never truly wanted—a creative mind, for instance, parked behind a desk where numbers and algorithms matter more than imagination. The second is a workforce that has spent those same years playing it safe. After watching others take risks only to lose jobs or burn out, many have chosen stability over fulfilment. The work stays the same, year after year, but the desire to leave quietly disappears.

Ashish Chopra's story strips away any ambiguity around rust-out. The 28-year-old Hyderabad-based professional is currently serving his notice period after spending two years in a role that gradually stopped challenging him.

“When I joined the company two years ago, I looked forward to every day. The job pushed me to solve problems, think strategically, and come up with creative solutions. I felt I was constantly learning,” he says. “But over the past eight months, the work has become predictable. I find myself solving the same kinds of problems on repeat, and the excitement of learning has disappeared. It feels as though there's no next level. Every day feels like a replay of the one before.”

Why rust-out is so easy to miss

The numbers suggest Chopra isn't alone. According to Gallup's latest global engagement data, employee engagement has slipped to 20 per cent, down from a peak of 23 per cent in 2022. It isn't a dramatic collapse—it's a slow leak, which is precisely what makes rust-out so difficult to detect.

Jasmi Bambhniya, social media and content strategist, traces the phenomenon back to Boreout! Overcoming Workplace Demotivation by Philippe Rothlin and Peter Werder, a book that argues boredom, under-challenge, and disengagement often feed into one another until employees become trapped in a cycle they struggle to recognise.

The behaviours it describes can appear almost comic—until you recognise them in yourself. A task that should take two hours quietly expands to fill an entire week. A spreadsheet stays open on one screen while online shopping happens on another. A briefcase is carried home every evening despite there being nothing inside that couldn't have stayed at the office.

“It's a full-time job pretending you have a full-time job, which is the joke and the tragedy in one line,” Bambhniya says.

The harder question is why people don't simply ask for different work—or leave.

Often, familiarity feels safer than uncertainty. Requesting more responsibility carries the risk of failure. Quitting carries the risk of unemployment. Staying, meanwhile, requires nothing more than showing up. Over time, boredom hardens into habit, and habit begins to resemble personality. What starts as “I'm still trying” slowly becomes emotional withdrawal.

Aditi Khanna, HR at a Gurugram-based multinational, believes technology is quietly accelerating that process.

“India is among the world's fastest adopters of workplace AI. ADP's People at Work 2026 found that 80 per cent of Indian employees use AI several times a week, with 41 per cent relying on it daily. Indeed also reported that seven in 10 Indian professionals now turn to AI to validate ideas or solve workplace problems,” she says.

“The mentorship piece has almost disappeared. Workers have too little autonomy, too little creative challenge, and too few opportunities to exercise judgement.”

Hybrid work has added another layer to the problem

A physical workplace, monotonous as it can sometimes be, still creates space for corridor conversations, spontaneous debates over lunch, and the everyday friction that keeps a mind engaged. Working alone behind a laptop offers little of that by default. Instead, many employees experience minimal interaction, a quiet hum of isolation, and the absence of the incidental stimulation that once came simply from sharing a room with other people.

What's the solution?

There is no single fix for rust-out. Broadly, though, it comes down to rebuilding the things digital-first workplaces have quietly allowed to disappear—room for experimentation, cross-functional collaboration, mentoring, and career conversations that extend beyond the annual performance review.

Khanna believes recognising rust-out is not solely a manager's responsibility. Employees, too, need to pay attention to the warning signs, often before anyone else notices them.

It rarely begins with dramatic moments. Instead, it surfaces quietly, first in temperament. Small frustrations begin to feel disproportionately heavy. An offhand comment stings more than it should. A lump rises in the throat for no obvious reason. Halfway through a conversation, someone's words simply stop registering.

Eventually, the change becomes visible in the way people show up at work. The employee who once questioned decisions, challenged ideas, or raised concerns gradually falls silent—not because the problems have disappeared, but because speaking up no longer feels worthwhile.

That may be rust-out's most telling symptom. The moment it no longer feels worth naming is often the moment it most needs to be named—to a manager, a trusted colleague, or anyone willing to listen. Otherwise, what begins as a workplace problem risks becoming something much heavier.

Tanvi Pandey, who spent years working in HR before stepping away from the profession, believes organisations often wait far too long to intervene.

“The fix, mercifully, doesn't require a crisis to justify itself—just the willingness to notice before the exit interview does the noticing for you,” she says.

“It starts with designing roles around what people are genuinely good at, rather than what a job description happened to say two years ago. Employees also need to see a future for themselves. The next rung of the ladder should be visible enough that they aren't left guessing whether growth is possible.

“Movement matters more than many managers admit. Rotate people across projects, encourage internal mobility, or simply give someone a new problem to solve. Ownership does the rest. When people are trusted to improve a process, they begin to care about it in ways no engagement survey can manufacture.”

Whether "rust-out" becomes a lasting piece of workplace vocabulary or fades the way some viral labels do, the underlying pattern—capable employees quietly disengaging from jobs that look fine on paper—is one that employers, and the people living it, are only beginning to reckon with.

Lead image: Pexels

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