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In her early work, for instance, Maslach found that younger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad. (In fact, that study from the University of Michigan explicitly said that younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.