Why are we so tired?
Distilling Books - Number 15
Welcome to Mental Garden. The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature. For the complete library, click here.
🏷️ Categories: Time, Minimalism, Happiness, Social relationships, Loneliness.
Sometimes it shocks me to hear how tired we are.
I’m not talking about the exhaustion after a week of work or a bad night’s sleep. I mean that background fatigue, chronic, like a hum that never stops. That tiredness that doesn’t go away by sleeping 8 hours.
And I wonder: how is that possible?
Every year we invent new technologies that promise to make our lives easier. Apps to save time, robots that cook, systems that organize your calendar, and now artificial intelligence, which promises to do everything—even your job.
We live in the age of total comfort.
So why do we feel so tired?
If you’ve ever had that feeling that life is running too fast, that you’re always late no matter how much you run, that tasks get done but the lists never stop growing—today you’ll understand why.
We live in what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han called the burnout society.
And until we understand its dynamics, we’ll remain trapped in this paradox.
The inner enemy
Every historical era has its emblematic illnesses.
In the 19th century, it was bacteria; in the 20th, viruses. Today, however, our ailments are not infectious but psychological: depression, burnout, anxiety, attention disorders, personality disorders… The depressive person, Han says, is the one who “can no longer do anything.” He lives in a society that demands he always be motivated, always willing, always at his best. And when he fails to measure up, he blames himself until he self-destructs.
The change is radical.
Before, we lived under what Han calls the immunological paradigm. There was an “inside” and an “outside,” a “me” and an “other.” The threat came from outside, like viruses or bacteria. Today that model has collapsed. We no longer fight against the external. Now the enemy lives within. The threat is not viruses—it is our own mind.
This self-destructive mind is the consequence of the modern cult of performance.
While the 20th century was defined by prohibition and limits, the 21st is defined by the almost infinite opening of possibilities. Now everything is possible. We no longer obey an authoritarian boss. Now you can and should be your own boss. No one yells “you have to do it” anymore. Now they tell you encouragingly: “you can achieve it, others already did.”
Nothing less is expected of you.
If everything is possible, what are you doing just standing there?
It sounds seductive. That feeling of freedom, of “being the best version of yourself.”
But here’s the trap: this freedom is just another form of control. Instead of being monitored by authority, now you carry that authority inside you. It’s no longer “you can’t,” now it’s “you can and should, everyone expects that from you.”
Today’s society worships performance, worships productive people, those who outdo themselves.
And what do we do? We self-exploit until we burn out.
You don’t need someone else to yell at you anymore—your own mind does it. The aggressor and the victim are the same person. We work more hours than the body can handle and demand inhuman rhythms from ourselves. What’s more, even leisure is now expected to be productive: reading more books, running more miles, squeezing every minute.
This is the paradox of our time.
The freer we are to do everything, the more dissatisfied we feel when we realize we can’t do it all.
The collapse of attention
This frantic rhythm has caused attention to collapse.
At Mental Garden we’ve already reflected on the brutal impact of new technologies and the frantic pace we’ve gotten used to: always being connected, always having the mind divided among a thousand stimuli. We think being everywhere at once is productivity, but it’s a serious regression because it forces us to live in constant alert, like a deer watching for predators.
And that makes us lose the ability to calmly contemplate and pay attention.
Modern life fears boredom—that fertile silence where ideas are born. We spend the day in motion, either working or working during our leisure time. We’re terrified of being still and unstimulated for even one minute, and that prevents us from thinking for ourselves and generating creative ideas.
Walter Benjamin said that “to be bored is to incubate.”
Nietzsche recommended contemplating the world with complete slowness.
Without calm contemplation, there is no true freedom.
The excess of stimuli steals our time to think and create.
Generalized doping
To maintain this frantic pace, we look for shortcuts.
Coffee, supplements, all kinds of medications—even drugs. In recent years, the market for pharmaceuticals to improve sleep, memory, or energy has expanded enormously. We want to artificially prolong the energy our bodies no longer have.
It’s no longer just athletes who dope themselves—students, office workers, everyone does it.
When doping becomes the norm, not doing it feels like being left behind.
Too many times I’ve heard people say they can’t perform without coffee.
Too many times I’ve heard people say they can’t sleep without pills.
When I admit I don’t drink coffee and sleep 8 hours without pills, people look at me strangely.
Now the strange thing is to follow the body’s natural rhythm.
Fertile time
Han doesn’t stop at criticism—he proposes a way out.
It’s about using the technologies that make us more productive to finish earlier and save more free time. Otherwise, you fall into the black hole of productivity: doing things faster only to fill that new space with even more tasks.
Only by prioritizing your free time over productivity can you escape the spiral.
Think about the value of doing less. Of scheduling time to stop and chat without hurry, to stroll aimlessly, to do something purely for pleasure, or simply to look out the window at a landscape. That is fertile time: a rest that opens space to play, wander, think, and create at will and without demands or performance tests.
The true antidote to exhaustion is not sleeping more or organizing your agenda better.
It’s reclaiming the right to stop.
The question that remains
Reading Byung-Chul Han, you can’t help but feel a bit uneasy.
What he describes is a self-imposed system of sky-high expectations. It’s our obsession with producing more in order to be applauded by others who also worship productivity as the synonym of success.
The question is no longer “how do we escape this system?” The question is more intimate: how do I stop exploiting myself?
Perhaps the answer begins with small gestures: letting ourselves be bored, contemplating, resting, saying “no” more often to plans, commitments, and responsibilities. All of it with the sole purpose of reclaiming the purest form of freedom.
The freedom to do nothing—without feeling guilty.
✍️ Your turn: What small gesture could you introduce this week to reclaim the freedom of doing nothing without guilt?
💭 Quote of the day: “The performance society is turning into a doping society. If doping were allowed in sports, it would become a pharmaceutical competition—just as society has.”
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Han, B. (2012). The Burnout Society.
it only took me seventy-something years to learn this, but my husband and daughter can benefit from this article. Especially the daughter. Thank you, Alvaro. This is truly a life-saving gem.
I found this contrast of inside/outside remarkably interesting. It reminds me of Lacquer's discussion in solitary sex regarding when certain behaviors became a problem. He suggests a lot of it had to do with the rise of leisure time and privacy: an inside that others could not see.