Don’t Give Up: Burnout in the Cultural Sectors

I burned out last year. It started with feelings of overwhelm that manifested as boredom and an inability to focus long enough to get anything done. Then followed the lack of energy, sleep not helping, nothing was fun, nothing was interesting, I couldn’t trust my own intuition, everything was too hard, small issues became paralytic. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I have gaps in my short-term memory from that period which I’ve been told is a form of PTSD. Same old story, right? When you’re on the downward slide there isn’t enough mental strength to recognise it, and certainly not enough to arrest the fall. Off you pop.

The point of this piece isn’t my ‘inspiring recovery’ story. It’s that everywhere I look post-burnout, I’m seeing others writing about burnout too, in sectors where there isn’t a lot of literature about it (e.g. not the usual corporate intensity-fuelled high stakes job) and where burnout seems to have different ingredients to the norm. I love my job, and maybe that’s part of the problem – purpose-driven work (creative, cultural, environmental, social enterprise) has different pressure points. I consider that archaeology belongs in this mix, and that’s the perspective I’m bringing.

I’ve seen three pieces of writing lately that have blown my mind: Dr Laura Crossley’s A Silenced Epidemic, a Clore Leadership and AHRC research paper on burnout in the cultural sector, published this year; the Diggers’ Forum’s report on wellbeing and social value in commercial archaeology, presented at the CIfA conference in 2025; and most recently Rhett Ayers Butler’s recent essay on the emotional cost of conservation work.

The similarities here are striking: this burnout thing isn’t a quirk of museums, or of archaeological fieldwork, or conservation organisations – and it’s not just the post-pandemic Great Exhaustion. It’s a pattern that shows up consistently, when a workforce is asked to sustain values-driven missions inside precarious funding models that deny the intrinsic value of the work.

Crossley’s research, drawing on 193 interviews and survey responses across the UK and internationally, finds that burnout in the cultural sector is “a silenced epidemic” caused not by individual causes, but by systemic conditions including short-term project funding, organisational cultures where overwork is expected, and a sector-wide habit of treating passion as currency. Her phrase for the wellbeing initiatives that sit on top of these conditions is “wellbeing washing”, often well-meant organisational intentions that can’t, and don’t, help with the issues (I see you, weekly yoga classes and pizza nights). I’ve written before about how culture sector funding models make this almost inevitable. Burnout is downstream of those issues.

The Diggers’ Forum, surveying 152 field archaeologists, found that 99% reported their wellbeing was affected by their work. The report themes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time on a commercial site: prolonged travel, physically punishing conditions, low pay, short contracts, lack of recognition, insufficient staffing. But what really struck me was that 63% of respondents felt that a stronger focus on social value would improve their wellbeing – that the meaning of the work, when they could feel it, was protective. The problem isn’t the work itself; it’s the conditions surrounding the work. Context is everything (sorry, not sorry!).

Butler, writing about conservation, talks about moral injury, “the distress that can come from witnessing harm, caring deeply, and still feeling unable to stop it.” He writes about conservationists trained to notice ecological destruction, and how that knowledge inevitably causes emotional impacts for which there is no recognition or pastoral care. He describes a sector that “asks for devotion but often cannot offer stability, safety, or care in return,” and people who chose the work because they loved something, were passionate about it, and who now find that has become a source of discomfort – just like archaeologists.

The structural conditions are the same: a workforce held together by vocation, rather than terms and conditions; funding models that pay for outputs, but dehumanise the people who produce them; and most of all the intersectional and disproportionate cost falling on women, early-career staff, those with caring responsibilities, and anyone whose life cannot accommodate work as the absolute centre of it.

I always think about the people who simply leave roles and/or the sector, or both, with this data rarely counted let alone understood. In the case of archaeology, we can at least point to some well-defined observations about when and why this happens, and despite well-meaning and dedicated efforts, nothing substantial enough has been done yet to change the underlying structures causing it. We can see the effect on our profession every single day. Want a post-Medieval pottery or CBM report? I hope you’re not in a hurry.

We’re special, so special

Archaeology as a profession has a habit of telling itself it is unusual to explain away and justify structural problems, and sometimes that’s true: the seasonality, the site conditions, the specific physical reality of fieldwork are genuinely particular to our profession. On the question, however, of how a values-driven workforce is sustained or worn down due to a precarious funding model, archaeology is not alone or unusual. In my small corner of the world, this shows up in a particular way, which I’ve written about previously: we cannot mature our experimental, engaged practice (which the overwhelming majority of archaeologists deeply care about) because there is no proper space for it in how the sector pays for itself or quantifies its own value.

The Diggers’ Forum report is basically a companion piece to Crossley’s, and Butler’s essay could easily be rewritten with “field archaeologist” instead of “conservationist.” The increasing number of conversations I’m having about burnout, systems change, and the circularity of it all are part of what’s helping in my own recovery. This is a real opportunity for us to look outside ourselves for solutions. It means archaeology doesn’t have to invent this conversation from scratch – it’s already happening. We are not alone.

What we do need to invent is the willingness to hear ourselves in other people’s words, for example by treating the Clore report and the Mongabay essay as part of our literature, too.

The burnout of a museum director, a marine biologist, and a site supervisor are not three different problems with three different solutions, but three versions of the same problem. Something collective is therefore essential to address it.

TL;DR: don’t give up

The bit I find hardest to read (and have waited till the end to mention, because it’s so hard to think and write about) is what Crossley calls a “sense of hopelessness” running through her interviews, the belief that nothing can change. Butler tries to push back against the same thing in conservation – he calls it the doom loop – that despair is the only response. The Diggers’ Forum highlights it in the comments about feeling trapped, about humour turning into something colder and snarkier. This is the bit that I am most worried about, and was definitely the tipping point of my own descent into burnout: hopelessness is the condition under which nothing gets fixed, or can ever be fixed, because you’re immobilised and it feels almost as if there’s no point to even muster the energy to try. That is the vibe I hope to fight against, by sharing my experience.

The archaeologist Anna Collar (now headed into politics for the Green party!), writing on LinkedIn about Butler’s piece, put her finger on the word that best describes the antidote: agency. She quotes Butler’s line that hope is not a mood but a method, and makes the apocalyptically important point that the restoration of agency is a mental health intervention. When people can see a chain of cause and effect (even a small one), they keep going. When they can’t, they pull back, from the work, sometimes from the sector, sometimes from caring at all.

I don’t think the antidote is optimism or toxic positivity (the news, the horrors, it’s all a bit much) but I do think recognition helps enormously – see it, face it, replace it. “You are not the only one” turned out to be one of the few sentences that changed how I felt, and made the draining sense of isolation smaller.

Due to a random chain of events, the universe has provided me with an 18-month investment in my own wellbeing, including the first of three retreats, which took place on a mountaintop in Brazil. Alongside colleagues from all over the world, and led by an expert on children’s picture books, I’m learning how to change my own story. It is absolutely my intention to bring every drop of learning back to the people I live and work with, and flow it through my organisation to the many individuals and communities we serve. For those of us who have chosen values-driven careers, some level of inner work is a fundamental need. It can be something as big as an 18-month commitment, or as small as someone simply letting you know that you are not the only one. So, I’ll say it: you’re not the only one.

A footnote, and a question

Of all the data in the Diggers’ Forum report, the one statistic I can’t forget is this: 63% of field archaeologists felt that a stronger focus on social value would improve their wellbeing. The thing the sector measures as a benefit to communities turns out to also be protective for the workforce. Meaning is not a luxury sitting on top of the work. It is structural.

This matters for how we think about social value going forward and is perhaps something we can offer back to the culture and conservation sectors also grappling with this issue. At DigVentures we’ve spent years building tools (the Impact Health Checker, our QA frameworks, Deep Time) to measure what participation does for people: confidence, connection, skills, stewardship, wellbeing. We built those tools to make the case for community benefit; what the Diggers’ Forum data suggests is that the same evidence base could be turned inward towards the workforce.

If meaningful work is protective, then measuring meaning isn’t only an accountability exercise, it’s a wellbeing intervention.

The feedback we get from participants on our projects is overwhelmingly what wellbeing literature calls ‘regenerative’: restoration, connection, renewed energy. So, if a day or a week on a dig can be regenerative for someone who joins us as a participant, what would it take for the work to be regenerative for the people who do it every day?

I don’t have the answer yet, but it’s definitely the right question. We’ve started small, with a Winter Fridays Wellbeing Trial, that gives the team protected time to rest and think. The early signs are interesting, and we’ll share more as we go. But I think the bigger answer lies in taking the social value conversation seriously as a workforce conversation too, not just a community one. That’s a piece of work I’d love to get stuck into.

To be continued!