Weirdly, Has Exhaustion Become Currency?

Got the above pull-quote from a newsletter. Years ago, I wrote a thing about how being busy is a drug for people. I probably believe that more than ever. In the last six-seven years, I’ve mostly been 1099, i.e. contract. A lot of times I enter an organization to do a specific task, usually marketing or writing, and I don’t know that much about the background of the org or who does what when I begin (same with full-time jobs, honestly). As you try to acquire this information from people, typically you met with a constant chorus of “So busy!” and “So slammed!” and what’s ironic is people wonder why others entering the org seem so incompetent and unaware of how things get done, and the answer is pretty simple — no one supposedly has the time to tell them or teach them anything. So it becomes a giant Merry-Go-Round of bitching and complaining and lack of training and “I’m so slammed,” and then we get home and collapse into child-raising or Netflix or video games or pornography or yelling on Facebook, and we wonder why things seem so broken.

The fact is, emotional exhaustion from work has scaled in recent years, and it’s scaled for two reasons. (1) is the virtuous reason — people are working hard, and trying to make their orgs better, and also focusing on family and hopefully friends, and they’re getting burnt at both ends. (2) is the performative reason — people aren’t that busy and exhausted, but saying you are busy and exhausted is a form of currency nowadays (and it feels like everyone else is saying that), so you do it, and in the process you’re largely blocking the path to real change or growth (for yourself and others). Look at a supposedly core issue like diversity, even. How many times is diversity pushed down the agenda because people are supposedly super busy with other things, that (this part is silent) mean more? Right. Time is a finite resource and time is money, as we’ve been told for generations. So time is what really matters, and within that time — at least in a work sense — people pursue status, relevance, and control more than most things. That’s largely the work game. If you get those things, you feel empowered, not exhausted. But if you work hard and can never get those things, then you feel like you’re not doing something right, you don’t belong, you’re not successful, you’re not “in” some club, etc… so you talk about being exhausted as a proxy for the relevance, status, and control. This is how most people work.

My ex had a friend, this kinda pretty nice but also pretty performative lesbian girl, and she would talk constantly about how hard work was, and how exhausted she was, and how she was burnt at both ends. Right after I exited that world, her and her partner adopted a kid, so perhaps some priorities shifted therein, and I hope they did for her. But for as much as she talked about work and how work never ends, whenever you’d see her, she’d be on Instagram, Facebook, etc… and tell you “Oh, well work is slow today for a change!” So many people are like this. The exhaustion-speak is currency, not reality. And it’s because we want to belong to the status and relevance club, but the door seems to be a little jammed and we don’t have a crowbar.

Takes?