A Survival Guide to the Great Exhaustion

Welcome to The Great Exhaustion. That’s how our modern era has recently been christined. With 47 million people voluntarily quitting their jobs last year, the cracks in our broke and burned out generation are beginning to show more and more. From family life, to the housing crisis, to global stressors, it feels like we are more exhausted than ever before. “People are feeling a strain on more than just their work calendars,” Emily Ballesteros wrote in Time last week. “They’re feeling it on their spirits.” From stay-at-home moms to tech executives, there is plenty of weariness to go around.

Chances are, the question isn’t whether or not you’re tired, but what you are tired of. Fatigue can manifest in a variety of ways — physically, socially, mentally, politically. Whether you are tired of your body breaking down, of preserving your honor, of grieving, of not knowing what’s next or of being alone, we all check the tired box somehow. It all begs the question, however: why exactly are we so tired?

There are limitless circumstantial reasons, of course — work deadlines, young children, aging bodies — but the curse of human fatigue ultimately comes down to one thing: we want to push against the limits of our human limitation. Yes, much of life is spent keeping up with the hustle of daily living, but we would be naive to say that we don’t contribute to our own exhaustion. We work hard with the expectation of being rewarded. We strive to make our mark on the world in order to justify our existence. In doing so, we live our lives in excess, attempting to overcome our status as creatures. In other words, part of the reason we’re so tired is because we hate being human.

The Bible is apt to address our never-ending languor. Isaiah acknowledges the reality that life is universally grueling: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted.” As the Israelites were undergoing intense fatigue while being held in exile, what does Isaiah tell them? “Lift up your eyes! Do you know that God created the stars and calls each by name?” In other words, if you need to get recharged, look no further than the source of all power.

But this instruction to peer at the heavens is also a reality check. As wondrous as they are, initial splendor gives way to the feeling of smallness. Compared to the vast splendor or the night sky, our own capabilities appear feebly inadequate. It is a reminder of what we already know, but from a different perspective. We are not gods who fail, but frail creatures who lack.

Only after our status has returned to that of a creature can we ever be able to run and not grow weary. As Jack Kerouac wrote in his personal journal: “If a dead man were allowed to return to the earth for one day … would this resurrected man waste any time contemplating the good and evil in the world? Or would he just feast the eyes of his soul in a hungry viewing of life on earth, the thing itself: little children, men, women, towns, cities, seasons and seas!” Lift up your eyes, in other words. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to receive. There’s more than enough around you to keep you going.

The problem, however, is that the Israelites (and we, too) have tunnel vision and are altogether incapable of lifting up our eyes. However well-intentioned the advice, those in a tunnel cannot be told to look on the bright side. However much abundance has been given to us, we fail to see beyond the next item on our to-do list.

Life in a tunnel is one of scarcity, where there is less and less time to go around. Every goal becomes a deadline and every new demand places us under the gun. Under the thumb of the almighty time-keeper, we scurry about to avoid his judgments at all costs. As Oliver Burkeman observes in his book Four Thousand Weeks:

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, its easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, but becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer — as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution.

Many of us find ourselves in tunnel vision season, when it is easy to feel like things are never going to change. When the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, we resort to taking up permanent residency in the tunnel itself. After all, the tunnel is not so bad once you move in your furniture and get some art on the walls.

Our ultimate hope, therefore, is not getting through the tunnel (i.e. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”), but that God himself entered into the tunnel of our finitude, descending from on high to the depths of our despair. God entered time to redeem us from its curse. As glorious as the heavens might be, we need a god who meet us at eye level and take from us the burden to become more than we are.

In George Eliot Janet’s Repentance a woman named Janet Dempster slowly finds herself in an abusive marriage to a severe alcoholic. Eventually, to numb herself from the pain, she starts sipping the drinks that he leaves around and becomes an alcoholic, too. One night, in a fit of rage, he locks her out of the house. Here is how George Eliot tells it:

She was tired, she was sick of that barren exhortation — Do right, and keep a clear conscience, and God will reward you and your troubles will be easier to bear.  She wanted strength to do right — she wanted something to rely on besides her own resolutions; for was not the path behind her all strewn with broken resolutions? How could she trust in new ones?

Janet then thinks of a man named Mr. Tryan who is the new minister in town who is not dignified and has a reputation for being “very fond of great sinners.” Janet herself would even poke fun at his earnestness but, in her exhaustion, she finds herself going to his door. Mr. Tryan takes her in and listens to her at great length. After she has said all there is to say, he says these words:

Do not believe that God has left you to yourself. How can you tell but that the hardest trials you have known have been only the road by which He was leading you to complete the sense of your own sin and helplessness, without which you would never have renounced all other hopes, and trust in His love alone? … It is you Christ invites to come to him and find rest. He does not command you to walk alone without stumbling. You have only to rest on him as a child rests on its mother’s arms, and you will be upborne by his divine strength.

When our load-bearing capacity exceeds our mortal frames, Jesus offers to exchange our yoke for his. It is not a false promise of a life without burden — we all have a yoke to carry — it’s just that his yoke is so much lighter. After all, he is God. He doesn’t mind doing the heavy lifting.

Fatigue, it turns out, is not without hope because it is a precondition for renewal. Weariness is a precondition for rest just as death is a precondition for resurrection. We may feel faint and weary, having exhausted all other options, but the gospel is the one thing that is inexhaustible. It is a love that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Our striving may have led us to the Great Exhaustion, but our collective death could very well lead to a great awakening.