We Are Fucking Tired

This article isn’t like the others I’ve written.

It’s not a careful analysis. It’s not a call to action, a thesis, or even a particularly structured argument. It’s a rant—one made up of hundreds of conversations, thousands of observations, and decades of quiet frustration. It’s what happens when you spend long days at work, consume far too much news about impending market collapse and the billionaires casually dismantling our institutions, and try to hold all of it in without exploding.

Lately, I’ve felt a pressure building—not just in me, but around me. Every story I’ve researched, every article I’ve drafted, every broken promise I’ve seen held up as leadership, has contributed to the weight that this piece carries. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t polished for publication. It was necessary. Even if no one ever reads it. Even if I never click “publish.”

This isn’t meant to convince or convert. It’s not for consideration or reflection. It’s just the truth, as I’ve experienced it lately.

We are fucking tired. And pretending otherwise felt dishonest.

~Dom

Over the course of my life, I’ve been tired in a lot of different ways. If you’re lucky, you might not even realize that there are different ways to be tired—and I both envy and pity you for that.

There’s a simple fatigue that comes when the day is done and your body has been used for what it’s worth; it’s the kind of tired that melts your muscles and rewards you with dreamless sleep. Then there are the more complex strains—mental, emotional, spiritual. These don’t dissipate overnight or evaporate with a weekend off. They linger, seeping deep into your bones.

I’ve been tired from unloading scrap metal under a Southern sun so punishing it felt personal, the kind of heat that scalds your skin and boils the sweat before it can offer any relief. When you take off those leather gloves, you realize that they’ve saved your hands from some scrapes and blisters, but there’s still a throbbing tenderness that no protective gear can shield. I’ve been that person who stumbles home after a long night of revelry and questionable decisions, only to find that my bed doesn’t grant me actual rest. Morning is a myth, a rumor only half-believed.

I’ve also been tired in a more insidious way: the kind where your mind revolts against you. Where every thought pulses with the threat of unraveling. You’d give anything—anything—to shut it all off. You catch yourself wishing for numbness, but that calm never lasts. Maybe that’s why there’s such a universal pull toward escapism, whether it’s Netflix or scrolling or that extra glass of whiskey. Even then, you can’t run from your own head. As the existentialist Albert Camus once pondered, there’s an absurdity to this relentless search for meaning in a world that refuses to give it freely. And yet, we keep hunting, keep burning ourselves out.

I’ve kept vigil in military service, eyes propped open by duty and fear that if I did nod off, even for a minute, something might go catastrophically wrong. That kind of responsibility weighs on your chest like a permanent bruise. I’ve entered the professional world just in time to see it buckle under the 2008 financial crash—my young optimism replaced by the sober realization that hard work doesn’t always guarantee stability. Then, when COVID rocked the globe, I worked endless overtime, stepping in for colleagues who vanished into memory or tragedy. Some, I’ll never see again.

And now, I’ve realized I’m feeling a fatigue that transcends the physical or mental. This soul-level exhaustion comes from being an American—an American with a conscience. It’s the burden of tethering your moral compass to a democratic process that fails to protect the most vulnerable. It’s the suffocating sensation of living in a society where ignorance can feel like complicity, and awareness can feel like torment. This isn’t just burnout; it’s something deeper, more existential. It’s the kind of exhaustion that echoes James Baldwin’s words, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” We might expand that today: to be a thinking, feeling person in this country is to be in a state of soul-deep weariness.

And here’s the cruelest part: it’s not just me. It’s not just you. It’s all of us.

Recommended Listening:

Generational Fatigue

There’s a perverse kind of unity in sharing this exhaustion, especially among Millennials. We were saddled with responsibility before we had any real power—and then had the gall to be mocked for it. We’re the scapegoats for industries that cratered, for traditions that collapsed, and for rebellions we never even asked to lead. We don’t get a nostalgic decade identity like the Boomers or Gen Xers do, with their golden memories of simpler times. Ours is the “Millennial” label, and it’s mostly been used as a branding tool to sell us avocado toast or berate us for enjoying it.

We grew up on the promise of endless possibility. The world was supposed to be open. Go to college, they said. Work hard, and you’ll achieve stability, they said. But the social contract was betrayed—maybe it was always just a fairy tale. By the time we reached adulthood, the world had erupted into chaos: the September 11th attacks, the war on terror, the Great Recession, climate crises, a political system that forgot how to talk but never forgot how to argue. It felt as if we’d been handed a small broom and told to tidy up while a hurricane tore through our living room.

Student debt soared, wages stagnated, and jobs became precarious gigs instead of lasting careers. Then there’s the anxiety we carry, reading about how the planet is getting hotter, storms more violent, economies more fragile. Our generation faces not only the repercussions of political and corporate greed but also the onslaught of digital hyperstimulation—24/7 news cycles and social media echo chambers that can amplify our dread.

The generational fatigue is palpable. We’re not lazy, but we’re consistently told we must be, or else why haven’t we “figured it out” yet? We’re not delusional, but we’re repeatedly assured that we are, for believing in progress and for trusting that compassion might still matter. The strangest part is that the older generations that forged these systems now decry the results they themselves built. There’s a thread of irony that runs so deep it feels like the punchline to a cosmic joke—one that no one is laughing at anymore.

Economic Exploitation

If you step back and look at the rhythms of modern work, you start to suspect that burnout isn’t just a byproduct of corporate life; it’s almost engineered into it. We’re expected to work harder, faster, and longer, despite wages remaining stagnant. Productivity is hailed as the metric that defines worth, but gratitude is an unspoken expectation. The moment you ask for rest—or, God forbid, compensation—you risk being labeled ungrateful. It’s hustle culture on steroids, glamorized in social media hashtags, while the real end result is sleepless nights, anxious mornings, and an unshakeable sense of never measuring up.

And if you do crack under the pressure? Burnout is suddenly treated as an individual pathology. The solution: practice mindfulness, eat better, “learn to cope.” The system that demands too much from us never seems to shoulder the blame. We scramble for self-care routines or mental health apps, as if a breathing exercise can reconcile the structural violence of exploitative labor. It’s like putting a bandage on a bullet wound.

COVID only magnified the rifts in this system. Overnight, entire industries ground to a halt or pivoted into chaos. Essential workers—grocery clerks, nurses, delivery drivers—became frontline warriors, celebrated in words but rarely in tangible support. People worked overtime not just to keep businesses afloat, but to stitch together the fraying social fabric. Meanwhile, the friends and coworkers who vanished from email threads and text chains became memories. Some returned, some never did. The rest of us carried on, haunted by the knowledge that we’re a heartbeat away from an unraveling that no plate of fresh cookies or yoga session can fully heal.

This invisible labor—of shouldering collective trauma, covering for absent colleagues, bridging the gaps in a broken system—is rarely acknowledged. It’s reminiscent of Simone Weil’s reflections on the human cost of industrial labor, where she argued that society often abstracts work into pure output, erasing the real suffering of workers. We’ve become cogs in a machine that never powers down, a machine that thrives on our exhaustion.

False Liberation

We were promised liberation of all sorts: sexual, intellectual, economic. We were told that the arc of history bends toward justice, that liberation is an ever-expanding horizon. And to some extent, maybe it is—same-sex marriage was legalized, women gained more representation, and once-taboo conversations entered the mainstream. But there’s a haunting question: how free are we, really, if every act of expression is monitored, packaged, and sold?

Social media gave a microphone to voices that were once marginalized. Yet it also created an ecosystem where corporations profit from our every interaction, where anonymity can breed cruelty, and where governments—both local and foreign—can surveil and manipulate us in real time. Personal expression becomes branded content. Activism becomes a hashtag. Authentic identity is distilled into curated images. The fight for liberation has, in many corners, been co-opted into just another marketplace.

Consider the plight of women, queer people, and non-conformists. For every celebrated advance, there’s a fresh wave of legislation aimed at erasing hard-earned rights, be it abortion bans or anti-trans bills. We see them pop up across states, each one another punch in the gut. The systemic cycles of oppression remain resilient, as if the moment we claim victory, the rules are quietly rewritten. Freedom, it seems, is conditional, fleeting—our expressions policed with new tactics as soon as we outmaneuver the old ones.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively on the concept of panopticism—the idea that constant surveillance controls behavior more efficiently than any prison guard could. We are now living in that digital panopticon, self-policing in ways we might not even notice. Is it truly liberation if we never feel safe, if we’re always one misstep away from public shaming or legal retaliation? Our exhaustion, then, comes not just from fighting for our freedom but from doing it under the gaze of a million watchers, many of them waiting to tear us down.

Political Exhaustion

Democracy, we were taught, is noble. It’s the grand experiment that promises to give power to the people. And yet, here we stand, exhausted by what democracy has become: a high-stakes game where every election is not just about ideology but about basic survival. There’s no room for apathy anymore, because apathy can quite literally kill. We vote in a state of crisis management, selecting options that seem marginally less devastating than the alternative. It’s triage, not vision.

Political ads and 24/7 news cycles scream that “the fate of the nation is at stake.” And maybe it is—but that hyper-vigilance takes a toll. We can’t stay in fight-or-flight mode forever. Our mental bandwidth shrinks as every issue becomes a three-alarm fire. We cast our votes, sign petitions, attend protests, and still watch the slow creep of authoritarian ideals rebranding itself. It’s Orwellian, but it’s also frighteningly mundane. This is the exhaustion of democracy as daily combat, where even small local elections can feel like do-or-die scenarios.

Moderation loves to call for civility, as though the polite middle can soothe the fires of hatred and fear. But civility doesn’t slow the rise of fascistic tendencies; it simply masks them in a veneer of politeness. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the banality of evil, it’s often the ordinary, respectable veneer that allows the worst kinds of social and political corruption to flourish. Democracy demands vigilance, but constant vigilance drains our souls. It’s a slow, steady bleed of our emotional energy.

We rage because we know better. We rage because we see how drastically our ideals fall short of reality. But we’re also forced to accept how powerless we are to singlehandedly redirect a monstrous machine that’s been set on its course long before we were born. It’s a rage that accumulates in the corners of our psyche, fueling that soul-deep exhaustion.

The Collective Cry: We Are Tired

It’s no longer just “I” am tired; it’s “we” are tired. We are tired of the fear, the grief, the outrage. We are tired of waiting for a break in the storm that never comes. We’re tired of being told to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps in an economy rigged against the average person. We’re tired of the shallow offers of “wellness tips” and “mindset hacks” that put the responsibility for systemic collapse on the individual.

We are the ones who keep the wheels turning even as they grind us down. We show up to work—virtual or in person—knowing the system is broken and that no matter how diligently we perform, we can’t fix it from our cubicles. We’re asked to remedy disasters we didn’t cause, to patch the holes in a boat that was already sinking before we stepped aboard.

And perhaps the most tragic part: we do it all while harboring a deep, righteous anger that often has nowhere to go. We’re angry because the world we inherit is not the one we were promised. We’re angry because the solutions we come up with are either too radical for the mainstream or too watered down to be effective. We’re angry because our exhaustion is mocked even as it’s being exploited. We’re angry, and we’re tired, and we’re not sure how to transform that fury into something more sustainable.

In the words of the late civil rights leader John Lewis, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” We recognize that the trouble we face is indeed necessary. But do we have enough left in us to keep pushing, or are we so worn down that we’re ready to sink into silent defeat?

The Threshold

We’re at a threshold, staring down an ultimatum we might not have the strength to answer. The existential question isn’t just, “Will we rise up?” It’s, “Are we even capable of mustering the energy?” When do we finally stop complaining about our collective fatigue and take action that creates the safe place to rest we all so desperately need?

Some might argue that the only remedy is revolution—upend the system, rewrite the rules. Others propose incremental change, piece by painstaking piece. The one truth we can’t ignore is that stasis is not sustainable. If we remain motionless, we’re going to sink. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the weight of freedom as a burden that we must actively choose to carry. If we don’t, we cede our agency to forces indifferent to our well-being. This action—whatever form it takes—is not just about grand ideals or heroic gestures. It’s about sheer survival. Something has to give.

Yes, we are fucking tired. We are world-weary, soul-weary, mind-weary. But if we don’t find a way to alchemize this fatigue into momentum, the alternative is a kind of collective slumber from which we might never wake. That’s how civilizations decline—slowly, then suddenly.

Each day we make a choice: to quietly accept the status quo or to fight for something better, however small or large that fight may look. If we somehow discover a form of activism or engagement that is sustainable, that might be the only real path to rest. Because real rest requires a sense of security, a sense that we’re not living in a perpetual threat state. Real rest requires a vision of a future where we can finally exhale.

Maybe, in the end, the ultimate irony is that the key to finding rest is fighting for a world where rest is possible. Change is survival, not just a lofty hope. That means we can’t afford to stand still, no matter how heavy our limbs feel. If we don’t move, we’ll be buried by the status quo, lulled into permanent sleep.

If rest is a revolutionary act, then exhaustion is the price of being awake in a world that doesn’t want to change.