“The Great Exhaustion”
To say burnout is real is an understatement. Society and culture has moved into a new era of fatigue called the Great Exhaustion.
Another era as a result of the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic; first there was the Great Resignation – a time that saw record workplace exits following return to in person work. Then there was the Great Reshuffle – a time that saw many professionals rethinking and reshaping what work-life balance meant to them after much reflection during the quarantine. Now it is the Great Exhaustion.
Writer Emily Ballesteros, in her 2023 article for Time, “Why We’re Most Exhausted Than Ever”, writes, “People are tired. Like, really tired… We’re now in the era of ‘The Great Exhaustion,’ what writer and computer science professor Cal Newport has called a time when people are looking to reestablish their relationship with work in order to reduce their pervasive sense of drain…factor in recovering from the pandemic, inflation, and global stressors, and you’ve got a recipe for complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.”
The article stated several factors that are influencing the Great Exhaustion: unsustainable lifestyles, uncontrollable stress, and financial insecurity. To sum it all up, inflation, global and internal chaos, and the inability to reach equilibrium in all areas of life has created this. It’s been five years since the early onset of the COVID-19 coronavirus. March 2020 brought on unforeseeable changes with the pandemic shutdown: businesses cutting employees or shutting down altogether, school districts having to pivot to remote learning to the detriment of students and parents, the fall of the economy due to declining revenue from the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries, and emerging political and global crises from police brutality, genocide, and war.
Now five years later a vaccine has been created and rolled out, stay at home orders have been lifted, and everything seems to be getting back to “normal”. However, many industries and working professionals are still trying to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Writer Megan Brenan, in her 2023 study for Gallup, writes, “Despite all of this, just one-third of Americans say their lives have returned to their pre-pandemic normalcy, nearly half report they are not back to normal and will never be, and 20% say life is not yet normal but will be eventually.”
The bigger question remains is there a possibility to heal from the Great Exhaustion or will this become part of the New Normal?
