Earning more, feeling less: the quiet burnout of young Vietnamese workers

The 27-year-old software engineer from southern Tay Ninh Province glanced at the screen, turned his phone face down and immediately went back to coding. Minh earns VND60-70 million a month from three jobs. He works full time at a tech company, freelances remotely for overseas clients at night and handles system maintenance for a startup on weekends.

His income puts Minh in a much higher bracket than his peers, but he cannot remember the last time money made him smile.

Minh's world is confined to the space between his two screens. Both lunch and dinner take place at his desk, with a Styrofoam takeout box sitting right beside his keyboard. The strong cup of coffee he drinks every morning now serves only one purpose: fighting off sleepiness.

The soccer shoes placed in the corner of his rented room haven't been worn in over a year, and the acoustic guitar propped up next to his wardrobe has two snapped strings.

Every time he lies down to watch a movie for more than 15 minutes, he turns on his computer to check on project progress. "The digits in my account keep going up, while I just stay numb. If I take even a single day off, I feel like I'm making a mistake," he says.

Many people face intense work pressure while having little time to care for themselves. Illustration photo from Pexels

Phuong, 28, a teacher in HCMC, has a similar schedule. After finishing her daytime classes at a public school, she teaches evening classes at a foreign language center, translates study abroad applications, and tutors students on both days of the weekend.

Her income of nearly VND50 million per month allows Phuong to buy her own vehicle, send money home to her parents every month, and become the "perfect" role model in her family's eyes.

In the classroom, she maintains a neat, energetic appearance, but once she leaves, she falls into a state of exhaustion. Her dry, raspy throat makes her dread everyday conversations. Messages from relatives often sit in her unread inbox for days.

On her 28th birthday, she returned to her rented room at 10 p.m. with two bouquets of flowers and a handwritten card from a student, placed them all on the floor, and sat leaning against the wall until nearly 1 a.m.

"Students congratulate me, and friends praise how capable I am. What I fear most is that I no longer know how to feel happy," Phuong states.

Vuong Nguyen Toan Thien, medical director at Lumos Psychological Counseling and Therapy Center, says Minh and Phương are classic examples of high-functioning anhedonia, or the state of performing well at work despite emotional burnout.

There are no official statistics on the number of people experiencing this condition in Vietnam or globally. But Thien says patients like Minh and Phuong are appearing more and more frequently in counseling rooms.

The dangerous thing about this condition is that patients still excel at making money, communicate skillfully, and maintain a facade of success, but have lost the reflex to feel joy. They do not collapse from a major crisis, but burn out gradually due to the non-stop, frantic grind.

This phenomenon stems from prolonged work structures, pressure to advance in one’s career, and the self-imposed psychological urge not to fall behind.

The modern workplace encourages this through the trap of "moralizing busyness", where replying to emails at midnight is praised as dedication, sleeping four hours a night is seen as responsible, and working through weekends is glorified.

But some companies claim this pressure does not entirely come from one-sided demands by management, but also partly from employees pushing themselves into overload.

Nguyen Thu Trang, HR director of a software development company in HCMC, says tech companies have now shifted almost entirely to performance-based evaluations (OKRs/KPIs) instead of attendance, but unspoken competition between young employees often drives up the workload.

"Many people voluntarily take on extra work, submit reports at midnight, or work through the weekend out of fear of falling behind or to prove their competence for rapid promotion. The company has a policy of turning off internal notifications after 7 p.m. and encourages taking time off, but quite a few employees still secretly open their computers to keep working," Trang says.

Employees' silent burnout is actually a major risk for businesses, because after a phase of "peak productivity," they often abruptly quit or experience a severe drop in performance, causing the company to spend money on recruitment and retraining someone else from scratch, she explains.

According to estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization, working 55 hours or more per week increases the risk of ischemic heart disease by about 17% and stroke by 35% compared to working 35-40 hours. In 2016 alone, some 745,000 deaths globally were linked to working overtime.

Dr. Hoang Tien Trong Nghia, head of the neurology department at Military Hospital 175 in HCMC, says chronic stress constantly activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising blood pressure and promoting the formation of atherosclerotic plaques.

The final consequence is a stroke, and young patients now account for an increasing proportion of hospital admissions.

Prior to that, patients typically go through a long phase with ignored signs such as digestive disorders, recurring headaches, insomnia, weakened immunity, and a gradual decline in productivity despite increased working hours. Without intervention, the condition can easily transition to clinical depression.

Thien notes that the way to catch early signs in "high-functioning" groups is to compare them with themselves from a few years ago, rather than with other people.

Warning signs include losing interest in old hobbies, failing to restore one’s energy on the weekend, changes in sleep and appetite, reduced concentration, no longer feeling joy at achievements, and a shrinking scope of life until only work remains.

The solution does not begin with quitting one's job or taking a long holiday. Thien recommends four small changes: setting a fixed computer shutdown time each day and treating overtime as an exception, scheduling sleep into the calendar like a meeting that cannot be canceled, taking 3 to 5-minute micro-breaks after long stretches of work to step away from the screen; and keeping at least one activity that has no goal of achievement, such as walking, cooking, or tending to plants.

Regarding treatment, he says antidepressants are not the default choice for pure occupational burnout like this.

According to guidelines from the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, patients need professional evaluation when severe symptoms appear, such as self-care deficit, clear functional decline, prolonged hopelessness, or self-harm ideation.

Regardless, all medical interventions are meaningless if the workload causing the illness remains unchanged. After a conversation with a counselor last month, Minh decided to decline a weekend system maintenance contract.

Instead of being cooped up in his rented room filled with soda cans and glowing computer screens, last Saturday evening, he took out the acoustic guitar that had gathered dust for two years and wiped down its strings.

"I couldn't play a complete song yet, but at least that evening my fingers felt pain - a real, physical sensation in the real world, instead of just blindly typing on a keyboard," he says.