The Cycles of Modern Life: Urgency, Control, and the Illusion of Comfort

we uncover a level of fatigue we didn’t know we carried, an existential exhaustion that stems from decades of running, chasing, doing, seeking, and adhering to the structures and the schedules laid out by a world that has gone mad.

I’m writing this installment with the themes of the last—exhaustion, burnout, tiredness, rest—still in mind. There are so many reasons why any of us might feel exhausted and depleted, but just now I find myself wondering how much of it is the result of aimless labors that serve only the operations of a techno-economic system designed to offer us ev

We must be vigilant about the ways in which we will flow in and out of the grips of grind culture. There will be days when you will be pulled back into the system and will find yourself spinning, dizzy with the effects of hyperproductivity. The work is to first gain deep awareness that the pace at which this culture is functioning is not normal or

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only ge