BY EMILY BALLESTEROS
GOOD QUESTION
PEOPLE ARE TIRED. LIKE, REALLY TIRED. AS EVIDENCED by recent trends such as “Quiet Quitting,” “Coffee Badging,” “Bare Minimum Mondays,” and most of all, “The Great Resignation”—when over 47 million Americans voluntarily resigned from their positions—people are feeling a strain on more than just their work calendars; they’re feeling it on their spirits. We’re now in the era of “The Great Exhaustion,” what writer and computer-science professor Cal Newport has called a time when people are looking to re-establish their relationship with work in order to reduce their pervasive sense of drain.
People feel so fatigued that they are cutting out activities that used to be commonplace and low stress, like working out and going to the supermarket. Factor in recovering from the pandemic, inflation, and global stressors, and you’ve got a recipe for complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
So why are levels of exhaustion increasing? The three factors that are commonly overlooked but are contributing the most are: unsustainable lifestyles, exposure to stress outside of our control, and financial insecurity. We’ve normalized these facets of our lives. But this normalization has caused us to disregard their impact on our physical and mental well-being.
New York Timesbest-selling author Dan Buettner spent his career studying “blue zones,” areas in the world where people live longer, healthier lives than anywhere else. In his work, he explains that people who live in blue zones have one thing in common: they live a human-needs-first lifestyle, in which the things that we need as human beings are prioritized. That means eating whole foods, having rich social lives, getting regular movement, and working with a purpose rather than for the sake of maximizing productivity. This is a stark contrast to most people’s realities. Outside of these blue zones, most people eat processed foods, strategically plan activities to socialize and get movement, and treat work like it comes before everything else. Daily life is about enduring demands. We have not built a human-needs-first society; we have built a business-needs-first society, and it is starting to show.
Fifty years ago, a single income could afford you a house, car, wife, and kids. Nowadays, you’re lucky if a dual income can afford you some of those things. Having a hard job that supports your lifestyle is one thing; having a hard job that barely pays the
