We're Living in the Age of Great Exhaustion

You ask someone how they're doing and the answer comes back almost reflexively: exhausted. Not good, not bad, not managing—just tired in a way that seems to have become the default emotional currency of ordinary life. But what if we're not exaggerating? What if we've actually arrived at a moment when the tiredness is real, systemic, and rooted in something deeper than a bad week at work?

The exhaustion people describe isn't laziness. A person can feel completely drained of the capacity to return a jacket that doesn't fit, to schedule a routine doctor's appointment, to answer the emails piling up in their inbox—and yet still show up to their job, still get their kids to school, still file their taxes. The small tasks feel impossible not because they're difficult but because something in the cognitive and emotional reserves has been depleted. There's no space left. One writer, Anne B. Peterson, captured this paradox in an essay about millennials and burnout: the exhaustion comes from having internalized the belief that you should always be working, always producing, always improving. Even when you're not at your desk, you're supposed to be.

Psychologist Emily Ballesteros, writing in Time, argues that what we're experiencing now is the aftermath of the Great Resignation—when 47 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in the years following the pandemic—but what's emerged is something more pervasive: an era of collective exhaustion. The causes are multiple and reinforcing. There's the unsustainable pace of modern life, a society built to serve business needs rather than human ones. There's the weight of crises beyond individual control: climate disaster, wars unfolding simultaneously across the globe, economic uncertainty. There's the particular damage of living through a pandemic that taught us the world could change overnight, then watching it fail to improve. As Ballesteros notes, people can endure hardship if they believe things will get better. When every news cycle suggests they won't, something breaks.

Thinker Eudald Espluga, author of a book on contemporary selfhood, describes exhaustion as a crisis of living conditions layered beneath a crisis of mental health. There's the relentless performance imperative—the sense that you're never doing enough, earning enough, learning enough, connecting enough. You're always falling short. Millennials and Gen Z have lived their entire adult lives under this pressure, having entered the workforce after the 2008 financial crisis, in an era of permanent precarity and declining standards of living. For them, exhaustion isn't a temporary state; it's the texture of adulthood itself.

The term burnout was first named as a psychological diagnosis in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, who defined it as physical or mental collapse caused by overwork and stress. For decades it remained a problem affecting certain professions—healthcare workers, teachers, high-stress jobs. But the data has shifted dramatically. A 2023 Gallup report on employment found that 44 percent of workers reported feeling stressed—a record high in the organization's history. The American Psychological Association, reporting in early 2022, found that pandemic-related stressors had become persistent and indefinite, triggering increases in cognitive exhaustion, emotional depletion, and physical fatigue. The pandemic, as one philosopher put it, was like constantly struggling to get your head above water only to be hit by another wave.

Josh Cohen, writing in The Economist, offers a stark image: exhaustion happens when you've depleted all your internal resources but can't escape the compulsive drive to keep going anyway. Everyone becomes a drained battery that doesn't recharge when plugged in—it just starts smoking. A burnt match walking around. Exhausted from being exhausted, living in an economy of collective depletion that shows no signs of stopping.