Exhaustion: A History

"Well, she would say so, I think. One of the things she’s trying to do in the book is pull us away from a kind of presentism that says that these are unprecedented problems that we’ve never experienced before. I think she’s right on this, and she points to those moments in our ancient and modern past where overwork and overstimulation has had a similarly urgent place in the public conversation. On the other hand, I would probably argue with her a little, because one always needs to make the arguments about the specificity of a particular condition, or why it is that this becomes such a live issue at a particular moment in history. But overall I agree that concern and alarm at our vulnerability to exhaustion and weariness goes back almost as far as the history of writing, the history of human observation itself. Ecclesiastes is one of the great statements of weariness of the self: “Vanity, all is vanity.” That sense of existential malaise, of all the possibilities of the world having already been exhausted, of there being nothing left to do, which again, we think of as being very post-modern. But it has a very venerable lineage to it. So if you’re interested in the genealogy of our present malaise, then Schaffner’s book is really interesting. It’s also interesting because she reminds us of how variegated a phenomenon exhaustion is. That it has a relationship to the physical, the mental, the social . . . It registers at so many different levels of life, from the intensely personal to the intensely public."