Golden Cage Stories as Burnout-Drivers

And how we can repair our work-life balance in unexpected ways

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published as an essential read on Psychology Today on 22 January 2026.

Working to Consume, Consuming to Medicate Exhaustion?

Many of the people I work with as a burnout coach tell themselves a golden cage story. On paper, their jobs and lives look great. And yet, they are exhausted, dissatisfied, and quietly desperate for more time, energy, and freedom. They long for a different rhythm of life – but feel financially trapped.

The story they tell themselves goes like this: It would be reckless, even irresponsible, to leave this job. I have too much to pay for. I can’t afford to step back. I have to keep up my standard of living.

Over the years, our expenses tend to rise in tandem with our salaries. Mortgages or eye-watering inner-city rents, childcare, holidays, cars and clothes, and the many quiet costs of maintaining a particular standard of living all accumulate. In a cost-of-living crisis, this pressure becomes even more acute. The result is a creeping sense of financial entrapment with little wriggle-room.

What makes this especially tragic is that many of us are too stressed, exhausted and time-poor to enjoy what we have worked so hard to afford. We long for more time – and then spend the little free time we have consuming, often in ways that aren’t even satisfying. We binge-watch series in a half-comatose state. We eat non-nourishing food. We drink too much wine to take the edge off. We shop online for fleeting dopamine hits. Even holidays can disappoint us because we expect too much, or else we collapse into them so exhausted that we immediately get ill.

Much of our consumption, if we are honest, is habitual or impulsive. It is not joy-driven but stress-driven – designed to medicate exhaustion and emotional depletion. Retail therapy, comfort eating, alcohol, endless scrolling: these are not signs of hedonism, but of depletion.

But here is the paradox: many of us work such long hours precisely so that we can continue to afford the very consumption patterns that help us survive the work that exhausts us. It is a vicious cycle. We become ever more time-poor and discontented so that we can keep buying things that don’t make us happy. The journalist George Monbiot writes: “Man was born free, and now he is everywhere in chain stores.”

This is where it helps to remember what true wealth is. True wealth does not only consist of money. It also includes time, freedom, health, community, meaningful connections, and purpose. When we privilege income over all other forms of wealth, we impoverish ourselves in less visible – but often more devastating – ways.

The Art of Frugal Hedonism

One powerful way of disrupting this cycle is to revisit the stories we tell ourselves about our consumption and work. A gripping alternative story and way of living is offered in The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More. Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb propose a radically different way of rebalancing our work-life patterns. Not through asceticism or joyless self-denial, but through discernment, creativity, and pleasure. Their premise is deceptively simple: if we consume less of what does not truly nourish us, we need less money; if we need less money, we can work less; and if we work less, we gain more time – time that can be spent on experiences that genuinely enrich our lives.

Most of us have been trained – culturally and psychologically – to privilege money over time. Even worse, we often use our free time in non-regenerative, consumption-driven ways. Part of the problem is hedonic adaptation. We quickly get used to almost all material acquisitions. The new coat, the new phone, the new car only briefly lift our mood, if at all, and then become the new normal. Our happiness levels return to baseline, and the hunt for the next shiny object begins again.

Experiences are different. They create memories, stories, identity, and connection. Training for a marathon, swimming in cold water, walking in nature, hosting a dinner with friends, volunteering, going on a trail – these experiences become part of who we are. They generate narrative meaning rather than clutter.

The frugal hedonism philosophy invites us to avoid waste at all costs – wasted money, wasted resources, wasted life-energy. It encourages us to distinguish between genuine needs and artificially generated desires. Between what truly enriches us and what merely distracts us. Of course, the advertising industry and social media work extremely hard to undermine our clarity, to generate in us strong artificial desires for things we don’t need and didn’t even know we wanted. And they use highly sophisticated tools to draw us in.

At its heart, frugal hedonism is not about asceticism but about relishing. About cultivating an “I have enough” mindset and truly enjoying a few well-chosen pleasures rather than chasing endless excess. It embraces constraint not as deprivation, but as the condition for meaning. Unlimited choice stresses and numbs us. Carefully chosen limits restore intensity, presence, and joy. Limits can clarify our priorities and provide clear guardrails for our spending.

Life-Cost

This brings us to another key concept that can help us to challenge our “trapped in a golden cage” stories and reassess our work-life balance from a different angle. The American philosopher Henry David Thoreau coined the notion of “life-cost” to describe the true price of our choices – not just in money, but in time, energy, health, and opportunity cost.

When we trade our time for paid work, what else do we give up? A higher salary, for example, may come with a longer commute, higher stress levels, longer working hours, poorer health, frayed relationships, and chronic exhaustion. Gains in income often come at a steep cost to wellbeing.

Thoreau famously calculated how much he required to cover his basic needs and then worked as a day labourer exactly for the time it took him to cover these needs. He spent the rest of the year doing what he truly loved: philosophising in nature and spending time with friends. He literally worked to live, not the other way round.

When we despair about our work-life balance, and tell ourselves the “golden cage” story, then, it can be highly instructive to factor in our consumption habits. Which of these are essential, and which are non-essential? Which truly nourish us? And what of what isn’t essential doesn’t even bring us joy? We may find that we can live on less, which, in turn, may free us up to work less, and to gain more time and freedom.

Images: Freestocks and Shutter-Speed@Unsplash and WIKIMEDIA COMMONS