As we have seen, the history of exhaustion reveals that concerns about its effects on the mind and the body of the individual, as well as on the wider social community, are by no means a modern phenomenon. The mental, physical, and spiritual symptoms of states of exhaustion have been theorized since classical antiquity and appear, under different names and labels, as common denominators in an ever-shifting historical regime of exhaustion-related syndromes. They include the physical symptoms of fatigue, weakness, and lethargy; the mental symptoms of weariness, disillusionment, hopelessness, lack of engagement, cognitive impairment, and irritability; and behaviors such as restlessness and the avoidance of activity, effort, and challenges. The ways in which the etiology of states of exhaustion is understood in different historical epochs not only illustrate the impact of changing medical and psychological paradigms—from humoral to nerve- and reflex-centered, from biological to psychoanalytical, from endocrinological to immunological, and from hereditary-genetic to psychosocial—but also illuminate prevalent assumptions about conceptions of subjectivity, responsibility, willpower, and the role of human agency in managing and maintaining both our physical and our mental health.
Moreover, since the symptoms of chronic states of exhaustion are predominantly subjective experiences and almost impossible to measure empirically, and especially given that there is as yet no scientifically accepted Western model of human energy, the narratives constructed around exhaustion are to a large extent dependent on metaphors. Theorists describing the interaction of mind, body, and society can very rarely provide evidence in the form of empirically quantifiable data. And even if such data is available—for example, as MRI scans or measurements of specific hormone levels in the brain—the ways in which the data is interpreted tend to be driven by specific assumptions and agendas, as is evident in the powerful influence of the pharmacological industry on the development and marketing of biochemical cures for depression.
Yet the metaphors deployed in exhaustion theories are not just particularly telling with regard to wider medical and ideological assumptions; they are also reality-generating. Metaphors not only are all we have in this field of inquiry (in that we cannot simply translate them into a set of “hard” facts with a definitive basis in material reality) but also shape the ways in which sufferers perceive, interpret, and narrativize their symptoms. Illness beliefs and mental visualizations of inner processes shape our experiences. The exhausted who believe that their weariness is caused by a surplus of black bile and black fumes clouding their judgment will experience their symptoms in a way that differs from those who believe that it is the result of a sinful attitude toward the divine good, or the movement of the planets, or loss and intrapsychological battles, or permanent cognitive overstimulation resulting from new technologies and a faster pace of life, or immunological dysfunction, or a deficit in serotonin levels, or the inhuman demands of a radically restructured world of work governed by the dictates of growth, competitiveness, and relentless acceleration.
Moreover, similes that compare the body to a tepid bowl of milk on which flies settle, a worn-out machine, an empty battery, an overdrawn account, a country with weak defenses invaded by hostile enemy forces, a plant slowly being sucked dry by a suffocating parasite, or an overloaded computer program also shape the cures that are administered by medical and other practitioners. These range from increasing to decreasing cognitive stimulation; from occupational therapy to absolute rest; from electro-, to hydro-, to hypnotherapy; from various dietary regimes to orphic dancing; from psychopharmacological drugs to mindfulness exercises; and from the talking cure to campaigning for legislative changes to protect the twenty-first-century workforce from physical and mental exploitation. The metaphors with which states of exhaustion are described thus have very real experiential and social consequences.
All exhaustion theories address either implicitly or explicitly questions of responsibility, agency, and willpower. In some accounts (most notably theological ones centered on the notion of sin but also more recent neoliberal ones that attempt to redirect responsibility for the management of the subject’s physical and mental well-being to the individual), exhaustion is represented primarily as a form of weakness and lack of willpower, and even as a grave spiritual or characterological failing manifest in a bad mental attitude. Some theorists firmly believe in the organic causes of exhaustion, such as a surplus of black bile that wreaks havoc with the bodily humoral economy, a lack of nerve power, the chronic overstrain of the cognitive system by too many external stimuli, the weakening of the immune system by viral infections, or various forms of biochemical imbalance. Within this category, the exhausted individual may be seen either as an innocent victim afflicted by parasitical external agents or as at least partly responsible for the state of exhaustion by having engaged in energy-depleting behaviors, such as working too hard, eating the wrong food, worrying too much, not getting enough rest and sleep, or overindulging in sexual activities.
Other exhaustion theorists allow for the possibility that character traits, individual mental states and attitudes, as well as wider cultural psychosocial pressures can trigger bodily responses: they assume that qualities such as optimism, engagement, contentedness, and resilience, and also insights into our psychological patterns and desires, translate directly into the amount of energy that we have at our disposal. Whether exhaustion is theorized as pertaining to the will, the mind, the body, or wider social developments shapes the ways in which the exhausted are perceived and, as a consequence, treated. The exhausted may be perceived as innocent victims deserving care and support or dismissed as shirkers and slackers; they may be categorized as mentally or physically ill; or they may be considered casualties of wider sociopolitical developments and technological transformations.
While it is possible to detect historically specific theorizations of the agents that cause exhaustion, and a tendency to look back nostalgically to other historic periods and to relate the depletion of human energies to specific technological and sociocultural changes, it is also possible to diagnose the recurrent production of theories about the loss of energy as expressions of timeless anxieties that concern the natural process of aging, the dangers of the waning of engagement, and death. These anxieties are increasingly commercially exploited not only by the cosmetics industry promising cures that halt and even reverse the physical signs of aging but also by the rapidly growing wellness industry and the manufacturers of the ever-expanding array of energy drinks, energy supplements, stimulants, neuro-enhancers, and mood-lifters.
Whether our own age really is the most exhausted is impossible either to prove or to disprove. It is, however, highly unlikely. Even the quantifiable proliferation of discourses on exhaustion, or the rapid increase in the number of people who are being diagnosed with exhaustion-related syndromes, is not necessarily an indicator that our own subjective experiences of exhaustion are more numerous or more intense than those in earlier periods. It might simply be more acceptable now to articulate and to seek remedies for one’s feelings of stress, weariness, and hopelessness. It is impossible to measure and compare the exact amount of energy spent and effort experienced by an office worker in the twenty-first century with that of a factory worker in the nineteenth century, a farmer plowing his fields in the early modern period, or a mother of ten starving children in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the discourses on the chronic forms of exhaustion that cannot be explained in terms of illness or extreme physical exertion that have been the subject of this study tend to focus on the experiences of predominantly middle- and upper-class “brain workers,” with a concentration not so much on the effects of external threats—such as viral infections, wars, hunger, violence, or hard physical labor—but on psychosocial stressors.
A frequently repeated argument of the exhaustion theorists, especially in the modern period, is that the technologies that have made our lives physically easier, that have accelerated travel and communication, and that should help us save both time and energy come with their own set of new psychophysical pressures, shaping both our public and our private lives in new, insidious ways, thereby undoing their beneficial effects. It is, of course, important not just to accept technological progress and economic growth as values in themselves, and to keep asking critical questions about the wider cultural and psychological effects of social and technological change. Exhaustion theories have traditionally functioned as vehicles for precisely such forms of cultural critique. At the same time, it is also worth remembering that, as Frank Kermode put it:
We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises…. It is commonplace to talk about our historical situation as uniquely terrible and in a way privileged, a cardinal point in time. But can it really be so? It seems doubtful that our crisis…is one of the important differences between us and our predecessors. Many of them felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them.
1Kermode neatly sums up a strategy that most cultural commentators tend to deploy, which entails a nostalgic glorification of the past paired with an ahistorical exaggeration of the perceived evils of one’s own time. It is the case, however, that our own age is characterized by a new worry—one that did not concern our ancestors. This worry relates to the exhaustion of our planetary raw materials caused by the rapidly increasing energy needs of a fast-growing world population and our careless habits of consumption. In the nineteenth century and especially in the final decades of the twentieth and the first part of the twenty-first centuries, fears about exhaustion, sustainability, and the depletion of limited energy reserves have become truly apocalyptic in that they have been lifted to the planetary level and beyond; that is, they are no longer limited just to the mind, body, or society but have been extended to incorporate our environment—the ground beneath our feet and sky above our heads.
The English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) articulated concerns about potential discrepancies between food supplies and the rising nutritional demands of a growing population at the end of the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century, moreover, saw the emergence of the second law of thermodynamics and associated apocalyptic anxieties about a “great cosmological exhaustion” brought about by irreversible energy loss, entropy, and the heat death of the universe.
2 The German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), for example, assumed that all energy would gradually dissipate, that all natural processes would eventually cease, and that the universe would thus soon be condemned “to a state of eternal rest.”
3Concerns about the effects of climate change, human-made environmental disasters, and rapidly depleting planetary resources such as fossil fuels, freshwater, and rain forests have been articulated and taken increasingly seriously since the 1970s and 1980s. These fears have been backed up with ever more solid scientific research, and the findings of research into climate change have become much more alarming and urgent in recent years. A study published in February 2015 by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for example, suggests that our current globalized form of neoliberal capitalism—a system based on consumption and the relentless extraction and depletion of natural resources—has already brought about irreversible changes to Earth’s biosphere, having thrown it into a state of imbalance.
4 The researchers found that together with rapid population growth and the vastly increased needs for energy and freshwater that follow from it, it is primarily growth-oriented, consumption-based neoliberal capitalism rolled out on a global scale that is responsible for unprecedentedly accelerated changes in Earth’s systems over the past sixty years. These include, above all, climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion as a result of unremittingly high carbon emissions.
Temperatures have already risen by 1.5°F (0.8°C) in the past few decades and, if carbon emissions are not curbed with immediate effect, will continue to rise rapidly.
5 Predictions vary, but a temperature rise of 7.2°F (4°C) by the end of the twenty-first century (a calculation that many scientists see as a realistic estimate) will have various dramatic knock-on consequences, including the melting of the ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and the disappearance not only of low-lying island states but also of numerous major coastal cities. The extinction of species, the loss of biodiversity, and the acidification of the oceans will accelerate dramatically; many crops will no longer grow; and heat waves and tornados will wreak havoc across the globe, putting the very survival of our species at risk. Even the World Bank (neither left-leaning in its politics nor generally particularly concerned with ecological matters) warned in one of its recent reports that we are “on track for a 4°C warmer world [by the end of the century] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise,” cautioning that “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”
6 Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change and deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, warns in equally unambiguous terms: “It is fair to say that among climate change researchers there is a widespread view that a 4°C future is incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community. 4°C is also beyond what many people think we can adapt to.”
7Will Steffen, director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, who led the “Planetary Boundaries” study conducted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, has found that of nine vital processes that underpin life on Earth, four have now officially exceeded “safe” levels: human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change such as deforestation, and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into our oceans as a result of excessive fertilizer use:
The climate system is a manifestation of the amount, distribution, and net balance of energy at Earth’s surface; the biosphere regulates material and energy flows in the Earth system and increases its resilience to abrupt and gradual change. Anthropogenic perturbation levels of four of the Earth system processes/features (climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, and landsystem change) exceed the proposed Planetary Boundaries.
8The effects of human activities on the major Earth systems, he argues, have grown so dramatically since the mid-twentieth century that they threaten the stability of the 11,700-year-long Holocene epoch, ushering in what in effect amounts to a new, “Anthropocene” geological epoch.
9 Human-driven changes such as the pumping of carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, aerosols, and fertilizers both into the atmosphere and into the oceans have dramatically destabilized the energy balance of the planetary biosphere. In an interview with the
Guardian, Steffen states:
When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution. It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale…. It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.
10In
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein argues that “climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species,” urging that climate change must be treated as a true planetary emergency, akin to September 11, the banking crisis, humanitarian catastrophes, and acute flooding.
11 Numerous scientists agree that if the planet’s remaining reserves of coal, gas, and oil really were to be extracted and depleted, contributing to the rapidly accelerated rate of planetary energy consumption that we have seen since the 1950s, which has already done irreversible damage to Earth’s biosphere, the exhaustion of these reserves might well lead to the extinction of the human species.
In June 2015, climate change scientists received support from an unlikely ally. In his encyclical aptly titled “On Care for Our Common Home,” Pope Francis I takes a candid and fierce stance against unfettered consumerism and climate change. While, unsurprisingly, not particularly worried about population growth, he deems the depletion and pollution of our planetary resources the greatest challenges facing humanity over the coming decades. Moreover, Francis argues that the exhaustion of raw materials is based on the immoral exploitation of the poorer nations, which suffer the consequences of climate change much more acutely than the richer nations, whose greedy consumerism drives this process.
12 The rich nations therefore owe an “ecological debt” to the poorer ones.
He reminds us that humankind has been granted dominion over Earth in order to “till it and keep it”—not to exploit and destroy it.
13 To till it means to make it fruitful, to enhance its power to yield nourishment, while to keep it entails caring for and protecting it—the stark opposite of exhausting it. According to Francis, the suicidal destruction of our common home thus qualifies as a sin on four counts: against the poor, against ourselves, against future generations, and against God’s creation. Harrowed by greed, overconsumption, exploitation, and wastefulness, Earth now “groans in travail”;
14 Earth and the poor cry together.
In his 180-page essay, Pope Francis touches on many of the topics discussed in the preceding chapters, but, in stark contrast to his spiritually and physically exhausted predecessor Benedict XVI, he presents concrete solutions to the problems he raises and appears hopeful that a better future is possible. He not only castigates the depletion and pollution of Earth’s raw materials, the loss of biodiversity, and the ways in which they are linked to global inequality and poverty but also addresses the underlying social, spiritual, and psychological factors that are responsible for these sinful activities in the first place. Like George M. Beard and other nineteenth-century theorists of neurasthenia, as well as contemporary burnout specialists, he bemoans the rapid acceleration of historical change and the general “rapidification” of life’s pace. He also criticizes the belief in technological and scientific progress as ends in themselves and complains about the information overload caused by social media and other communication technologies, which generate “a sort of mental pollution,” melancholic dissatisfaction, and social isolation.
The insidious “globalization of the technocratic paradigm,” he asserts, is spiritually empty; markets and a desire for economic growth should not be allowed to dictate politics in the exclusive way they currently do, as they encourage “rampant individualism,” “compulsive consumerism,” our “throwaway society,” and a “self-centred culture of instant gratification.” He urges us to embrace a “new lifestyle” to overcome this collective and sinful selfishness. All of us should gradually phase out the use of fossil fuels and embrace the principle of the common good, to ensure justice for future generations and the poorer nations; limit the consumption of nonrenewable energy and assist poorer countries to support programs of sustainable development; embrace a new attitude of humility and gratitude; and tackle unethical consumerism by boycotting tainted products and by shopping more ethically, and thus reshape the out-of-control markets. Finally, he also urges his flock to remember to honor the Sabbath, the law of weekly rest that exists to counter physical and spiritual exhaustion—to celebrate a contemplative and communal form of rest that is designed to sensitize and respiritualize us, and to urge us regularly to reflect on the purpose of our existence.
While, as we have seen, it is far from being the case that our own age is the only one to have been preoccupied with exhaustion, concerns about exhaustion at a planetary and cosmic scale first emerged in the nineteenth century and have grown ever more intense and urgent in the past few decades. The rhetoric of our age is unique in that anxieties about exhaustion, sustainability, and resilience no longer concern only the mind, body, or society but our very habitat. Might this particularly apocalyptic exhaustion discourse, then, for the first time in human history really correspond to an empirically measurable reality? There is certainly a growing body of evidence to suggest that the threat to our planetary resources and the consequent exhaustion of our very biosphere are very real indeed.