“It happens that I get tired of being a man,” wrote Pablo Neruda in Walking Around. “I do not want to continue being a root in the darkness, wavering, spread out, shivering with sleep […] absorbing and thinking, eating every day.”
His vital fatigue is something we can identify with in a society that has imposed competitiveness and productivity as standards. The same society where mental health problems increase along with the workload and pressures, generating an increasingly urgent need to stop everything.
Confusing self-exploitation with freedom
Societies, in themselves, are nothing more than structures of organized behavior that allow us to interact daily with a certain level of automation, as sociologist Alejandra Nuño explained. For this reason, many of our daily routines happen without thinking.
Every day, as soon as we wake up, we assume different roles that contribute to maintaining that social order. We do it automatically and we continue like this, always pushing ourselves a little more to be able to handle everything and prevent everything from overwhelming us. So we continue forward, living on autopilot for much of the day, which then turns into weeks, months and years.
We have introjected competitiveness and productivity to the point of carrying our own forced labor camp, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han said in his book “The Burnout Society.”
Thinking ourselves free, we assume the rules of a game in which we are at the losing end because “The society of performance is simply the society of self-exploitation,” according to Han. Except that “External coercion is replaced by self-coercion, which is passed off as for freedom.”
In this way, we end up demanding too much of ourselves. When “Excessive work and performance worsens and turns into self-exploitation,” it ends up affecting our mental health. And, if that were not enough, blinded by the flashes of toxic optimism, we are expected to face all those challenges that wear us down with a smile on our faces. We are expected to camouflage job insecurity with motivation and obligations with enthusiasm.
Obviously, this coercion that we impose on ourselves ends up being destructive and pathological. It makes no sense to think that the productive pace we have achieved is a sign of progress if it forces us to consume psychotropic drugs in order to continue producing until exhaustion.
The modern dilemma: if you stop everything breaks, if you continue you break yourself
The human being has to exhaust himself. Of course. It is part of our nature. Exhaustion is not bad when it is accompanied by the satisfaction of a job well done and that deep peace that encourages rest. The problem is exhaustion that grates on the nerves, generates frustration and is accompanied by dissatisfaction. This type of structural exhaustion, a product of continuous overexertion, prevents us from resting, condemning us to a state of continuous stress.
Our nature must be resistant and resilient. Nobody doubts it, but as long as it adapts to the rhythm of human life, to the pace that our balance imposes and whose limits are marked by our body and our mind, not by the consumer society or productivity at all costs.
For that reason, “Slowdown is not enough, we need a new way of life that redeems us from rampant stagnation,” vital dissatisfaction and soul fatigue, which is precisely what Han advocates.
Life is life only when it is lived, and sometimes living involves restlessness and exhaustion, but that cannot be the norm. It is necessary to produce in favor of life and not against it. So maybe we should take a break from ourselves to put ourselves back together.
Take a break from our routines.
Revalue them.
Putting what we do under the magnifying glass, assuming the psychological distance necessary to reflect on our habits and goals in life.
This way we will avoid reaching the point where we have to decide: either we stop and everything breaks or we continue and we break ourselves.
References:
Nuño, A. (2022) ¿Necesitamos descansar de nosotros mismos? In: Ethic.
Han, B (2012) La sociedad del cansancio. Herder: Argentina.
