how “existential tired” has become the great industry of the West

In season 9, the twelfth doctor and clear They arrive at a space station In orbit around Neptune. It is the 38th century, on Tuesday. The ship is deserted and only encounter a small rescue mission, but none of that interests us today.

We are interested in ‘Morpheus‘, strange machines that allow rest in record time without sleep. A magnificent way of not losing hours with closed eyes, of using our time in little useful things. And “with all the chemical advantages of rest.”

“Congratulations, professor. He has revolutionized the labor market, has conquered nature, has created an aberration,” Capaldi says When they explain how the machine works. An “aberration” is true. But one with which many have often fantasized. One that many have ever used.

Because, after all, what are the energy drinkshe Recreational methylphenidate or the techniques for Learn to sleep just four hours but small ‘morpheus’ machines? What are they but Symptoms of an increasingly tired society?

When the body asks to stop

The problem is that the tiredness we are talking about is much more than not sleeping. Chronic stress, lack of sleep, the increasingly accelerated and hyperactive life rhythms, digital overload, anxiety, burnout … the idea that we live in an increasingly exhausting society has become not only A common place of contemporary discourse, but in An identity feature of our time.

That is why there is no lack of theories that try to find the key that allows us to explain what is happening. Some are well documented and add up To chronic lack of lack of sleep: This is the case of nutrition. Some specialists They have proposed The hypothesis that part of the generalized fatigue that affects us is due to minor vitamin or mineral deficits.

The best known example is vitamin B12. A deficit of this vitamin can cause anemiaweakness and persistent fatigue. In severe cases, It can cause problems To breathe, dizziness or neurological problems. And, although marked nutritional deficiencies are not very common in healthy young adults, they do increase with age and, in an increasingly worse food contextthey can go unnoticed for months.

In this sense, a B12 supplement can help us be less tired and, on a certain level, it can be an explanation, yes. But When we talk about exhaustion We talk about something that “You cannot easily explain in physical terms“, something that” resides on the border between the mind and the body. “

Hyperproductivity, multitasking and digital overload

It is enough to review the data to coincide in that fatigue has become an ubiquitous phenomenon, an epidemic, a conviction: from the worker Burnout to the student saturated with information, through those who live in permanent anxiety … everyone has in common that rare feeling of fatigue, tiredness and exhaustion.

According to eThe report State of the Global Workplace from Gallup to 44% of the professionals surveyed said they felt high levels of stress daily. And it is something that can be seen in other similar work reports, like this from Adecco in which he pointed out that 40% of workers Spanish and global They had suffered Burnout during the last year. The data has dropped slightly from the posterior peak to the pandemic, but They are still very high. Too high.

Being direct: everything seems to indicate that, to purely organic causes, we must add the constant impact of a lifestyle focused on hyperproductivity (Toxic productivity), multitasking and permanent overload. As explained Harvard’s psychologist Natalie Dattilo, “feeling the pressure of being productive at every moment of the day – always a list of slopes and guilt for not fulfilling it – is a sign of this phenomenon that leads to anxiety, insomnia and extreme exhaustion.”

In the 90, David Lewis coined The expression of “informative fatigue” to talk about mental exhaustion due to excess information. Today, with smartphones constitiously claiming our attention, That phenomenon has been globalized: Constant notifications, dozens of open eyelashes, a permanent stream of emails, chats and social networks. Is the story of A very expensive way of life at the cognitive level, of loss of efficiency and generalized fatigue.

Interior fatigue

Because, as Schaffner pointed very wellwhen we talk about exhaustion we talk about something that “cannot be easily explained in physical terms”, something that “resides on the border between the mind and the body.” To the malfunction of psychophysiological machinery and excesses of the social environment, something else must be added: the deep emotional, cultural and even philosophical roots of contemporary fatigue.

That is, the idea that exhaustion is still a ‘cultural symptom’ of our time. In “The Society of Tiredness“, To look for one of the introductions most accessible to these ideas, the philosopher Byung-Chul have stated that we have ceased to be a” disciplinary society “(as Foucault defined us) and we have become a bizarre evolution of it: incommunicado masses of ‘businessmen’s businessmen’.

It is what Almost a decade has denounced Jose César Peralesprofessor at the University of Granada, that “positive thought” is problematic “because it responds to An ideology and concrete economic motivationsbecause it makes the unique people who are good for feeling good, under the threat of being tildos de Toxicbecause hides the true causes of psychological well -being or discomfort, and because it interferes with serious interventions aimed at promoting mental and physical health. “

The self -exploitation that Han complaint either The ideological frames that Jonathan Crary examines They would be the mechanisms that promote a “society of exhausted, depressed and isolated individuals,” a world where “emblematic diseases of our century are no longer viral infections, but neural disorders such as depression, burnout syndrome or attention deficit disorder.”

Are we more stressed than ever?

With all this on the table it is difficult not to repeat that “We are more stressed than ever“. And yet, something does not fit. Little after we fell, we realize that the history of fatigue is somewhat more complicated.

“Many ages tend to present themselves as the most exhausted, as if exhaustion were an honor badge and compete for the title of the most shattered was a kind of sport,” he wrote Anna Katharina Schaffner in ‘Exhaustion: History‘; A historical review not only about exhaustion, but of the ways in which societies thought about him.

It sounds like something modern, to one of the figures of the alignment; Therefore, this professor at the University of Kent was surprised so much when she discovered that “humanity has always worried about the exhaustion of its energy resources.”

In his book, surprisingly current descriptions of the exhaustion from the Greeks appear onwards. The Greeks, in fact, They thought it was due to an excess of bile in the blood. In the divine comedy, Dante speaks of “spiritual exhaustion”; In his letters, Darwin gives numerous details of the exhaustion that accompanied him; And writers are not lacking (Kafka, Wilde, Woolf) that they were diagnosed with neurasthenia.

“What changes throughout history is not that we worry about exhaustion, but how we explain it,” Schaffner said Thinking about the theological doctrine of the first Christians, Vampirism either Saturn’s impact. But, in reality, many times that did not happen, because Theories about neurasthenia From the nineteenth century, they are very similar to the current theories that award to the rhythm of life, to new technologies and acceleration in contemporary chronic tiredness.

Humans in his labyrinth

What if, in reality, we have always been tired? And if all the theories, hypotheses and ideas that we have considered but masks of a permanent problem What has accompanied us since we left Africa? What situation does that leave us? Is our curse tiredness?

I don’t have the answer. After this long historical, scientific and literary escape from existential fatigue, I have the feeling that (in effect) when a machine like ‘morpheus’ finally arrives the commercials of the company will arrive at their home and, paraphrasing the end of’The Asterion House‘, they will say:

• Will you believe it, Ariadna? Those poor humans barely defended themselves.

Image | Bruno Aguirre

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