The Economics of Connection and the Emotional Recession

By Amanda LaMela

Maybe you’ve noticed a shift during your Monday team meeting or at the coffee shop at 8:49 a.m. The faces are a little blanker than they used to be. Lighthearted small talk has been replaced by doomscrolling and distracted stares. You might find yourself asking, “Why does the work feel heavier even though my job title is technically the same?” 

Researchers have started calling this an "emotional recession." A 2025 study by Freedman and colleagues tracked nearly 28,000 adults across 166 countries from 2019 to 2024. They documented a 5.79% global decline in emotional capacities. They found the sharpest drops in dimensions they categorized under “drive”. Intrinsic motivation, optimism, and a sense of noble purpose fell 7-8%. The decline was steepest from 2019 to 2022, then plateaued. The researchers framed that plateau as stabilization. Unfortunately, “stabilization” might mean that our new normal has hit an all-time low.

The declines were most pronounced in healthcare, education, and technology, exactly the sectors where the work is most relational. Freedman and colleagues also cited a vicious cycle in the burnout literature. Chronic burnout depletes the emotional resources we need to recover from a hard day at work. Basically, when it comes to emotional availability, we have a major supply-demand problem.

The work that nobody measures.

A sociologist named Allison Pugh has spent years studying something she calls "connective labor." She defines it as the creation and sharing of emotional acknowledgment with another person through genuine recognition and reflection. It comprises empathic listening, emotional management, and witnessing, which means reflecting back what one sees. Pugh studied therapists, chaplains, home health aides, and teachers. But if you're a New Yorker in any profession, you almost certainly do some of this kind of work too.

Connective labor occurs when you de-escalate a tense conversation during a Zoom call before circling back to the task at hand. It happens when you read your manager's mood from a single Slack message and adjust your entire update accordingly. It occurs when a client is having a bad day, so you let them vent to protect the working relationship. It happens when you have to deliver bad news to your team, even though you disagree with management’s decision. This work doesn't show up on your performance review, and your calendar doesn't account for it, but it costs invisible resources every time.

Pugh argues that this work is caught up in "colliding intensification." The demand for connective labor continues to expand, and more jobs require relational and emotional skills than ever before. At the same time, the conditions for doing it effectively continue to diminish. As the work around connective labor becomes systematized, scripted, automated, and accelerated, true connection becomes strained. Pugh references Simon, a community clinic physician whose relational time with patients is increasingly squeezed by his electronic health record. Pugh also interviews Veronica, a coach at an anxiety app whose clients keep asking, "Are you a robot?" because her scripted templates have completely sucked the humanity out of her replies. The work that requires presence is being asked to happen in the gaps between everything that requires efficiency.

Why workload doesn't predict retention.

The relationship between workload and how you feel is not direct. A 2021 study by Zhang and colleagues examined air traffic controllers managing conflicts between aircrafts. Twenty-one controllers worked through 27 simulated scenarios. Researchers expected that as scenarios got harder, controllers would step in more often. That's not what happened. As difficulty climbed, controllers actually pulled back on their interventions, stopping short of what would have been optimal performance. The researchers called this 'workload homeostasis,' and framed it as a smart adaptation. Controllers were holding cognitive resources in reserve for the next emergency. Essentially, our nervous system is trying to keep enough in the tank to handle the next surprise. It's an intelligent system, but it has limits. When we are pushed outside our window of tolerance, the same protective moves that once kept us steady can start to look like withdrawal and disengagement.

A separate study by Zhau and Wang surveyed 582 public servants across 29 district offices in New Taipei City. They used structural equation modeling to test whether workload directly caused turnover. (It didn't.) Workload predicted turnover only through two mediators: job satisfaction and the relational psychological contract. The “relational psychological contract” refers to the implicit, relationship-based mutual obligations between the employee and the organization (such as loyalty, support, trust, and career development). The factors that predicted whether people stayed or left their companies were relational, not transactional. When management shirks these implicit obligations, its workforce walks away, even if the formal pay structure remains unchanged.

While Freedman et al. (2025) took a different approach, they arrived at the same conclusion. Their research found that high job demands produce burnout when emotional resources are depleted. The mediator is the worker’s access to psychological resources that sit between the demand and the outcome. 

Many of us try to address burnout the wrong way. Taking a vacation can certainly boost your mood, but it is not a long-term solution. If the structure of your role impedes your capacity for authentic connection and sense of recognition, then a few long weekends aren’t going to fix anything. The mediator is still depleted. You can't Eat, Pray, Love your way out of a meaning-making problem.

The fraught economics of human connection.

Have you ever found yourself thinking, "I used to handle this kind of thing, but I just can’t bounce back anymore?” The Freedman team highlights how emotional depletion is a vicious feedback loop. Persistent exhaustion impairs the psychological capacities needed to recover from it. The optimism, motivation, and sense of purpose that would normally energize you are exactly what burnout depletes. Workers are basically being told to dig a hole, but then they are expected to use the same arm muscles to climb out of that same hole. 

Zhang’s (2021) findings about workload homeostasis further demonstrate the relationship between exertion and resources. In a well-resourced setting, regulating your effort to preserve cognitive reserves is considered high-functioning. This is how a senior surgeon stays sharp through a long operation. However, in under-resourced environments, this regulatory instinct still activates. The withdrawal that was supposed to protect you begins to look like disengagement and performance failure. Zhau and Wang data captured this at the workforce level. Public servants withdrew psychologically before they withdrew physically. The satisfaction score dropped before the resignation letter. By the time the resignation arrives, the relational damage is months or years old.

Context matters more than load.

If comparison is the thief of joy, burnout is like Ocean’s Eleven. Two professionals with identical workloads can have entirely different internal experiences. One professional may find themselves at the center of a depleted network with a manager who only ever communicates in tasks. Another professional can have the same calendar but a meaningful relationship with their team, recognition from their manager, and at least one person who notices when they seem stretched thin. It is the same job title, but an unrecognizable experience. Comparing yourself to a peer who "seems to handle it fine" rarely reveals anything useful about your own capabilities or resilience.

Is being human becoming a luxury?

Pugh's 2023 follow-up article raises an additional consideration in the conversation about burnout. She found that skilled practitioners differentiated their work from what a machine could do through three strategies. These practitioners described their labor as "not routine," citing invisible elements such as intuition, witnessing, and naming unspoken emotions. They performed their humanness through small talk, personal disclosure, and the small risks that scripts forbid. They justified their judgment as part of what made being seen by them meaningful. One interviewee, a therapist, described a time when they misread a client. The repair that followed this rupture became pivotal in their relationship. Real connection comes from human mistakes, followed by genuine efforts to repair.

While this anecdote seems heartwarming, Pugh noticed something unsettling. These strategies were not equally available to everyone. The workers who could afford to make mistakes, express judgment, and go off-script were the more privileged practitioners. Less advantaged informants, including home health aides and gig workers, faced consequences for any departure from expected scripts. They could not afford visible mistakes. Pugh argues that performing humanness is becoming a stratified resource, available to workers with enough institutional cover to take small relational risks. It is becoming progressively unavailable to those without it.

The strategies that protect connective labor are rationed by hierarchy. And this luxury is becoming scarcer for everyone. Freedman (2025) suggests that even among the relatively privileged, the underlying emotional resources required for those strategies are depleting. Workers who feel most disheartened are often those who once found meaning in the unscripted moments of their work. Value was derived from mentorship conversations, post-meeting check-ins, and genuine moments of self-disclosure with trusted coworkers. Unfortunately, many of these opportunities have thinned out.

What's missing is something only humans can give.

The research is meaningful for anyone considering therapy. According to Pugh, connective labor has four parts: empathic listening, emotion management, witnessing, and acknowledgment. Connective labor cannot be performed alone, and it certainly cannot be done by an app pretending to be a person. What makes being witnessed have such an impact is that it is being done by another person who has chosen to be present with you. Humans who aren’t following a script can have spontaneous interactions, screw things up, and make genuine efforts to fix their mistakes. Only humans can build authentic human connections.

Addressing the emotional recession in therapy.

At PAD Mental Health, we don’t rely on endless forms and worksheets. Our work is about restoring contact. We help you regain contact with what actually matters to you, which has likely been clouded by what you “owe” others and the perpetual fear of falling short.

Connective capacity can only be replenished by connective contact. Therapy is one of the few places in modern life where the entire hour is designed around being seen. It is a unique space to connect with another person who doesn’t expect you to perform, which is rarer than most adults realize. 

References

Freedman, J. M., Freedman, P. E., Choi, D. Y., & Miller, M. (2025). The Emotional Recession: Global declines in emotional intelligence and its impact on organizational retention, burnout, and workforce resilience. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1701703. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1701703

Pugh, A. J. (2022). Emotions and the Systematization of Connective Labor. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(5), 23–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211049475

Pugh, A. J. (2023a). Connective Labor as Emotional Vocabulary: Inequality, Mutuality, and the Politics of Feelings in Care-Work. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 49(1), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.1086/725837

Pugh, A. J. (2023b). Constructing What Counts as Human at Work: Enigma, Emotion, and Error in Connective Labor. American Behavioral Scientist, 67(14), 1771–1792. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221127240

Xiu-Hua Zhau & Mei-Lin Wang. (2024). A Study on the Relationship between Workload, Job Satisfaction, Relational Psychological Contract, and Turnover Intention of the Public Servants. International Journal of Information and Management Sciences, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.6186/IJIMS.202403_35(1).0005

Zhang, J., E, X., Du, F., Yang, J., & Loft, S. (2021). The Difficulty to Break a Relational Complexity Network Can Predict Air Traffic Controllers’ Mental Workload and Performance in Conflict Resolution. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 63(2), 240–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720819880646