The Exhaustion Is Political

Why burnout is not a personal failure, but a governing condition

We wake up tired. Not just short on sleep but already spent. The kind of fatigue that makes “Breaking News” feel like a threat instead of information. That dulls our attention when we tap a card to pay more than we expected for less than ever. Our calendars are either packed with obligation, hollow with isolation, and neither leaves much room to breathe. Everything demands attention. Very little offers relief.

Always tired, we tell ourselves we just need rest. Another weekend nap. Another vacation. Another productivity tip whispered through earbuds or in the thick of traffic. But if rest were the solution, this would have worked by now. The exhaustion keeps returning, deeper and harder to shake. This isn’t burnout in the old sense. It’s something closer to saturation.

We talk about burnout because burnout feels solvable. It points us toward habits, boundaries, and coping strategies. Things we can adjust without asking uncomfortable questions about the environments we inhabit. Framing exhaustion this way offers a sense of agency, when real agency feels scarce. That framing, while not wrong, is incomplete.

Burnout language made sense in settings where the problem was overload within otherwise functional structures. The fix was recovery: rest, recalibration, resilience. But what happens when the structures themselves are the source of the overload? When the demands are continuous, the expectations asymmetric, and the support conditional or absent? In that context, treating exhaustion as a personal health issue quietly misidentifies the cause.

This is why resilience has become such a celebrated virtue. It is most praised where support has been withdrawn. The more responsibility is pushed onto the individuals, the more individuals are told to adapt, optimize, and manage themselves better. Exhaustion becomes something to fix privately rather than a signal that something is misaligned publicly.

That misalignment is not abstract. It emerges in how systems distribute risk, authority, and care. It shows up in the demands of work that never pause, services that never stabilize, and obligations that never abate. It appears in the friction of bureaucratic requirements and the absence of reciprocity when help is sought. What looks like inefficiency is often just cost-shifting: time, energy, and emotional labor transferred onto people who can least afford them.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a pattern of outcomes that repeat with unnerving reliability.

Outcomes like the continuous churn of crisis on top of crisis – economic, political, social – produce a population overwhelmed not just by tasks, but by the sense of task. And when people are overwhelmed, their time horizons shrink, their civic bandwidth narrows, and their capacity to organize or contest recedes. Exhausted people do not revolt. They withdraw. They cope.

That matters because exhaustion, when misunderstood as a personal failure, functions as a mechanism of stability. It cools outrage before it becomes action. It turns systemic strain into individual adjustment. It converts structural misalignment into private optimization.

This dampening effect is political. It shapes how we see our role in the situations we face and how we respond to the breakdowns around us.

Today, in cities like Minneapolis, that strain is visible in real time. Another resident has been shot and killed by federal agents during a dubious ‘immigration enforcement’ operation. Part of a series of shootings that have sparked protests and demands for accountability from local leaders and citizens alike. In a moment like this, fatigue is not a distraction. It is part of the psychic landscape we are all navigating.

Understanding exhaustion as a political condition changes what we ask next. It doesn’t diminish the personal toll. It amplifies the structural signal. The question is not how to recover faster, but why such recovery is required just to function, to pay attention, to participate, to live.

And until that question is answered honestly, individuals will continue to shoulder what is not theirs alone to bear.