It’s another week of Societal Armageddon in the media, with New York Magazine pontificating about the science of burnout and Time chiding us for obsessing over chemical weapons attacks and avian flu while chainsmoking unfiltered Camels and shoving triple bacon cheeseburgers down our gullets. These articles, intended to pull back another onion layer of our human foibles, are packed with quotes from researchers and experts, and broken into easily digestible snippets that a subscriber list of upwardly-mobile white collar workers can read on the subway after yet another 12-hour workday.

So what to take away from all this? We’re burned out and obsessed with death. We eat, sleep, shop, consume, trudge into offices, answer emails, deposit paychecks, file invoices, submit performance evaluations, type resumes, sweat over promotions, go home, repeat cycle. We work and work and work some more as a way of existing, a lifelong means to some distant end. Of course we’re frazzled to the point of shoving Sharpies into our eye sockets. And dammit, we should be! Burnout is a good thing! Ceaseless busyness and constant worry must mean we’re getting somewhere! Doing important things that are worth burning out and worrying over! Getting us closer to wherever it is we’re going!

But here’s the bitch: Burnout isn’t real. It’s a state of mind, a conversation that we have with ourselves on a daily basis that governs our entire life strategy. Get up, go to work, work hard, be successful, do well, reach the top of your field, help people, contribute to society – then will you be fulfilled. If I can just make partner, I’ll be happy. If I can just crack six/seven/eight figures a year, I’ll be happy. If I can just get this screenplay sold, I’ll be happy. If I can just help enough homeless veterans find food and shelter this winter, I’ll be happy. Fill some need within ourselves, through more money, more power, more charity, whatever we’re focused on at the moment. Funny how we devote countless movies, books, songs etc. to illustrating what a steaming crock this whole line of thinking is, but no one ever really believes it.

What we never stop to ponder is that there is no means, there is no end. No fulfillment exists at the finish line – no proverbial pot of existential bliss is waiting on your retirement day, ready to burst out of the butter cream sheet cake at your Farewell Party. Happiness is a concept created in language, a word used to describe a feeling that only we can generate. The phrase “bring happiness” is an oxymoron – it can’t be brought, it has to be spawned.

So, while all these researchers and experts and “workplace consultants” are analyzing office air circulation and the ergonomics of desk chairs to figure out how to “make work more fulfilling” so Citigroup and Time Warner can hold on to the “best talent” for the better part of their adult lives, no one ever considers that the problem they’re trying to solve exists purely in context. Try shifting the spectrum and changing the conversation – I don’t do my job to gain happiness, I do it because I’ve chosen to do it. There is no end to work towards, there is no final rung on the ladder. There is only the job to do today, and I’ll get it done because that’s my choice, and because my work means something, even if it’s only that my bills get paid.

Sure, it’s not the easiest mindset to maintain with your boss screaming and your Blackbery buzzing and floods of “Super Mega Urgent” emails streaming into your inbox. But it’s amazing how freeing it can be to wake up and actually believe that what happens to you today at work isn’t the deciding factor in your personal happiness and fulfillment.

True, personal responsibility for happiness can’t be focus grouped or carefully marketed or advertised with sexy subliminal images. And if no one can produce it or package it or sell it to you, then what good is it? Funny, it’s that line of thinking that got us into all this trouble in the first place.