Emma Seppala was working as an intern at The International Herald Tribune (the past iteration of The International New York Times) one summer in college in Paris, shuttling between the newsroom writers and editors on the second floor and the workers at printing presses in the basement.

Ms. Seppala, the science director at the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, mulls the difference between the two starkly different atmospheres in her 2016 book “The Happiness Track”: One floor was raucous and full of laughter, the other floor was solemn and quiet. Can you guess which one she enjoyed being in more?

It was the press workers who had a sideboard covered with wine, cheeses and bread. They were vibrant, Ms. Seppala writes. “I believe most of us want to be like the French press workers: we want to do a good job no matter what that job might be — and we also want to be happy doing it.”

She later notes, “We have simply accepted overextension as a way of life.”

In today’s era of workplace burnout, achieving a simpatico work-life relationship seems practically out of reach. Being tired, ambivalent, stressed, cynical and overextended has become a normal part of a working professional life. The General Social Survey of 2016, a nationwide survey that since 1972 has tracked the attitudes and behaviors of American society, found that 50 percent of respondents are consistently exhausted because of work, compared with 18 percent two decades ago.