Too Tired to Care, Too Busy to Think

I ripped a hole in a pair of my favorite pants while hiking the East Coast Trail. Not only did I shred my pants—I shredded my knee, too, and had to go to the hospital. For the rest of that trip, I walked around with duct tape over the hole, determined to fix the fabric when I got home. That was two years ago. Those same pants now sit in my closet, beside the sewing machine my grandma bought me in high school. Both collecting dust.

Why haven’t I fixed my pants?

I lack the time.

Time to teach myself how to use the sewing machine again. Time to problem-solve a skill I know I have but haven’t used in over 15 years. Time to set up at the kitchen table. Time to research my machine, find a YouTube video on how to set it up, and another video on how to repair the specific hole in a specific location.

Our daily lives have become harder. We’re asked to do more with less time and money, all while prioritizing our health and well-being—especially if you’re a parent with kids in activities outside of school and home. Don’t forget to clean your house occasionally, have a social life, do laundry, prepare your car for each season.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? That’s my theory about capitalism.

The more overwhelmed and consumed you are by everything, the more exhausted you are to do anything about it.

When I was teaching full-time, I was working 14-hour days. The minute I woke up, I was checking emails—because I knew I wouldn’t have time once I got to school. I got ready, drove an hour and a half (one way—who can afford to live in Burlington?), prepped my classroom, taught all morning, and then spent lunch as a dissociated zombie, usually doing café duty or supervising the art room so students could catch up on projects. Then I taught all afternoon. After that, I had 75 minutes to clean, write emails, mark, call parents, or get pulled into another classroom for supervision. Then I’d drive home—another hour and a half—walk my velociraptor of a puppy, eat dinner, and start planning the next day’s lessons. If I was lucky, I got to bed by 10:30 pm, just to do it all over again.

During that time, I had no social life. I didn’t take care of myself physically. Saturday was the only day I could see my husband. Sunday was for cleaning.

I had no time. No energy.

If anything went wrong—like car troubles—it felt like the end of the world. I’d burst into tears, completely overwhelmed by what should have been a small inconvenience.

I didn’t know how unhealthy I was.
I didn’t know how unsustainable that life had become.

Car troubles happen. So do family deaths and puppy blues. These are normal parts of life. But when they happen while you’re already operating at max capacity, it breaks you. I had to take a stress leave. Before I was even 30, I hit a wall. I needed the world to stop.

And what about everyone else?
People who feel the same way?

Maybe they don’t work 14-hour days or carry their job's emotional baggage the way I did. But they still don’t have the time or energy to think, problem-solve, or sit down—let alone fix their damn pants.

Now add social media to the mix.

Algorithms steal the time and energy out of your cultural consumption. Too tired to find music? No problem. The algorithm gives you the most broadly liked, least offensive songs. It’s not exactly what you want, but it’s not bad enough to change.

Looking for a coffee shop? Google Maps knows you’ve been to Starbucks 20 times this year—it’ll send you to the closest one, even if there’s an indie spot a block away.

Algorithms make decisions for you, so you don’t have to.
Sounds convenient, maybe even utopian.

But think of all the music or coffee shops you could have discovered if you had the time and energy to search yourself. One of those might have changed your day—or your life. Maybe that’s where you’d run into an old friend. Maybe that unfamiliar song becomes your new favorite.

Since leaving teaching, I’ve reevaluated my life, meticulously.

I’m more thoughtful about how I eat—less meat. More thoughtful about my mental health—I finally addressed my anxiety and underlying depression through therapy. More thoughtful about what I buy—do I really need another bathing suit? I swim five times a year. More thoughtful about how I spend my time and energy—burnout, it turns out, takes years to recover from. I’m still recovering.

I think about what kinds of decisions people would make if they had the time and energy to make them. And I recognize my privilege:
If I had kids, I wouldn’t have been able to leave teaching.
If I didn’t have a supportive spouse, I’d still be teaching.
If we didn’t make enough between us, I’d still be teaching.

I think about all the teachers I’ve spoken with since who wish they could quit but can’t—because of kids, finances, or both. I think about parents who are burnt out from jobs they can’t afford to leave.

We’re all tired.
So many of us are burnt out before we even hit 40.
I see a problem—a big one.
And it’s being fed by companies, governments, and social media.

Capitalism steals our time.

When we have less time, we have less energy to care, to think, to analyze. And when we have less energy to care, we seek easy solutions—solutions sold to us through targeted ads and data mining, down to the creepy feeling that your Alexa or Google Home is listening.

We used to have a Google Home on every floor of our house. We love music, so it made sense. But we started noticing weird things—it would start talking randomly during board games, lights flashing when we were mid-conversation. Our ads got eerily specific, tailored to whatever we had just talked about.

So we tested it. And what we found was uncanny.
Now we only use it as a speaker—with the microphone off.
And those oddly specific ads? Gone.

Evan Puschak, in his essay “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,” writes that we no longer spend time discussing what we experience because:
“The internet isn’t interested in those gaps, those moments of reflection or conversation.”
That isn’t just about the internet. That’s how daily life works now.

While Puschak says the internet “obliterates the time between experiences,” I think the expectations of modern life do the same.

He also writes:
“The internet of today, designed to make you a permanent input, does more than just steal time from you; it erodes your agency and substitutes internet-awareness for self-awareness. Those are the three things—time, agency, and self-awareness—that we use to construct our identities. Without them, sense of self weakens, identity destabilizes, and the result is what we see in the research and feel in ourselves: stress, anxiety, or worse.”

When I read that, everything stopped.
I sat in bed rereading the paragraph over and over again.

I think Puschak is one point away from the full picture:
Who controls the internet?
Not the government—they’re years behind on policies to protect citizens.

My theory, in all its simplicity, is this: late-stage capitalism.

Our world revolves around money.
Not through quality products anymore—but through cutting corners, planned obsolescence, cheaper materials, and most of all: profiting off your exhaustion, your lack of time, and your inability to think your way to a better solution.

Of course, this is just a theory—one filled with confirmation bias. I know I’m seeing others online say the same things, and maybe I’m missing another perspective. I probably am.

But maybe you’re reading this, sitting in bed, and thinking to yourself:
“FUUUCCCCCKKKKK.”
Because all of a sudden…
it makes sense to you too.

 Puschak, Evan. Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions. Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

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