We say: “pressure,” “exhaustion,” “routine”… as if these words were sufficient to explain what is happening to us. Yet the fatigue we live with today is not merely an increase in workload; it is fatigue with a new tone, while our language remains old. We use the vocabulary of yesterday to describe an exhaustion produced by the rhythms of today, and then we wonder why we no longer understand ourselves well, and why we return each week with less memory and a narrower heart.
When the World Health Organization included occupational burnout in the ICD-11 in 2019, it described it as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, with three clear characteristics: energy depletion, mental distancing or negativity toward work, and reduced professional efficacy. This is not a luxury of definition, but rather a mirror of what we see around us: people who do not so much hate their jobs as they hate the exhausted version of themselves within those jobs.
Contemporary literature has expanded the understanding of burnout as a slow erosion of engagement rather than a transient fatigue. Maslach’s (2016) review reminds us that burnout is not merely an individual problem, but a disturbed relationship between the person and the work environment; when expectations inflate, the space for control narrows, and the rewards that create meaning are replaced with rewards that satisfy appearances.
With education and work expanding into broader digital arenas, fatigue has acquired an additional face. A recent study in Kuwait (Al-Enezi, 2025) pointed to a relationship between “digital overuse” and school burnout among secondary school students, with academic resilience playing a mediating role. Even the student no longer becomes exhausted solely from the book, but from the notifications that study alongside them, and from the assignment that does not end when the class session closes.
For this reason, the phrase “take a vacation” sometimes appears beautiful… yet incomplete. A vacation rests the body, but it does not redefine boundaries. The new fatigue requires courage in reorganizing our relationship with time, with the screen, and with the very idea of achievement itself. To ask calmly: what is consuming me because I do not dare to turn it off? And what do I do because I fear appearing less present?
Recovery may begin with a small change in the criterion of success: that it no longer be “how much did I accomplish?” but rather “what remains of me after the accomplishment?”. To grant ourselves the right to brief pauses without guilt, the right to close one unnecessary digital window, and the right to a day in which the human being is not the last item on the schedule.
Our fatigue today is not always a personal weakness. At times, it is an intelligent alarm that the language with which we describe our lives no longer suits the speed of life itself. And when we possess a more precise language, we possess a more precise courage… to protect the human within us before we protect the image.
