Our Exhausted Lives

It’s barely the beginning of the year and already I can see burn out in the people around me. Both the young and the older are trudging through the day in a haze of fatigue, the kind I’ve usually only witnessed at the end of a particularly onerous year.

Feeling bogged down by an inexplicable weight, each day passes in a blur until we find ourselves at the end of another workweek questioning the apparent absence of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

The difference between the two cohorts, of course, is that the young are still tinged with that optimism that life is yet to beat out of them. They still believe in the fight, in the need to rise up and the certainty that it will make a difference. Meanwhile, the older have relented and given in to the general sense that everything sucks, we have no real power, and the best we can do is focus on the job at hand.

I made a flippant remark recently within hearing range of one of the younger crew, which I regretted almost immediately – I said, “I used to care about these things too, once, but now I’m older and don’t have the energy.” I regretted this comment for two reasons, firstly, because it wasn’t intended as insult to younger people in general, as I feared it might be taken, nor did I wish to deride their passion.

But the truth is, as you get older, and as you experience more of the shit that life can hurl your way – be it illness in yourself or others, death of loved ones, family responsibilities, mental health breakdowns, relationship breakdowns, job loss and subsequent job searching, money pressures, aging parents, betrayals, let downs, disappointments and a whole myriad of other personal challenges - you feel your capacity to care about the bigger issues dwindle. And this is if you’ve had a relatively good life, free of real traumas such as abuse, poverty, or war. Not to mention menopause.

Being an adult takes a lot of effort. And the longer you are an adult the more effort it requires. So you focus your efforts on the matters closest to you: your family, your friends, your job, and maybe your community – these are the elements you reserve all your energies for. But what do you do about the wider injustices happening outside your own realms of existence?

The truth is, as hard as it may be, we DO want to care. But it takes energy to care and to care in a meaningful way.

It takes energy to keep an open mind, to not fall into stereotypes, to not make sweeping generalisations, to block out the incessant, gnawing blast of the media, which would have us constantly outraged.

And let’s not mention the energy it takes to wade through tedious opposition politics, which has been reduced to nothing more than a series of incensed sound bites designed to increase their click rate, just so we can get the vaguest insight into what our governing bodies are actually doing.

And given that we can’t rely on any form of media or politician to truly deliver balanced, unbiased and informative commentary, it would take energy to properly inform ourselves so we can properly care…and so we don’t inform ourselves.

Because we’re too exhausted.

And because we’re exhausted, it’s easier to believe that “there are no good Muslims”, that the “Jewish lobby” controls the media and government, that immigration is the ruin of the world, that the world is going to burn or drown, that all police are thugs, that all governments are fascists, that all news is fake news, and that life has never been so bad. Because believing in one or all of these things makes us feel like we care.

But all it really does is make us even more exhausted.