Exhaustion: Good and Bad

Choose to be humanly exhausted

I walked through the airport, exhausted after a long week. And I bought Bojangles.

It was glorious.

Not because of the chicken and mashed potatoes. But because of the exhaustion.

I was not exhausted by too much information. I was not bewildered by a thousand emails and messages. I did not have the internet cascade upon me until I crashed into a rock of mental exhaustion.

I was just tired.

Exhaustive fatigue comes to us in two ways. The first way stems from an overload of information, resulting in fatigue from accumulation. We greedily or necessarily receive more data, more information, more stuff. Our mind and body exhaust themselves.

The second way fatigue comes to us is through a long day, a hard job done, a singular focus on an objective. We often celebrate that feeling as a job well done. You might ride the bus home, content and mentally acute, but tired. This exhaustion follows from accomplishment or simply a long day.

We call the experience of both exhaustive fatigues by the same name, but they are fundamentally different.

We are made for the second, while the first overwhelms our psyche. The second brings us satisfaction, quiet tiredness. The first scatters our mind, produces nervous energy.

The causes of each kind of fatigue differ too. The second follows from something deeply human: the end of a long day of work, play, or whatever else. The first follows from something deeply new to humanity: the endless onslaught of information that overloads.

We will never get the leisure we want. Seneca, in his On the Shortness of Life, points out that even Emperor Augustus desired to enter into leisure, but his public life would not free him from his burdens.

But we do have choices. We can rescue our psyche from data overload. We work humanly to become exhausted as humans. We can.

It is all a choice.

A choice to have digital devices in the early morning and the late evening. A choice to look at one more update. A choice to enter an industry that requires preoccupation with endless information that must be infused into our psyche at every moment.

Everything. All of the time. The internet.

Be human. Embrace fatigue, just make sure it is the human sort.