Exhaustion is a strategy. What looks like collective fatigue is actually the consequence of a carefully engineered mechanism designed to rob us of our power — our power to resist, to imagine, to protect each other and to create sustainable change. Burnout is many things, including an effective political tool for our oppressors.
According to the American Psychological Association, more than 77 percent of the U.S. population considers the future of the nation a significant source of stress — a figure that has climbed steadily since 2016. But these aren’t just abstract statistics. They reflect a measurable deterioration in our collective capacity to engage.
Crisis-focused news triggers stress responses that can last days, meaning many of us never fully recover between news cycles. We’re caught in a loop of headline anxiety and breaking news, leaving us socially and politically aware, but mentally worn out.
This exhaustion isn’t accidental. We’ve faced a rapid succession of crises in recent years: a global pandemic, economic ruptures, ecological devastation, genocides, state-sanctioned violence and political upheavals. Each crisis demands our full attention before we can process the last, creating a perfect storm of overwhelm.
Our political landscape is built on this foundation of constant crisis, where the next catastrophe is looming just around the corner. Take Project 2025, for instance. This isn’t just another political initiative — it’s a masterclass in overwhelming the public consciousness. When the Heritage Foundation released this 900-page policy blueprint, most people couldn’t process its full implications. How could they? The document proposes radical changes to executive power, civil service and democratic safeguards, but its sheer volume makes meaningful public engagement nearly impossible. Then came the strategic confusion: Trump claimed no knowledge of the document, yet his early executive actions aligned precisely with its objectives. This isn’t just political maneuvering — it’s a deliberate strategy of cognitive overload. By the time we’ve parsed one aspect of the plan, three new controversies have emerged, each demanding our immediate attention. The mental labor required to track these contradictions, to separate truth from theater, is itself part of the exhaustion strategy.
The manipulation of our attention through corporate news and social media platforms has created a vicious cycle keeping us tired enough to question whether we should continue fighting, but fearful and outraged enough to keep consuming distressing news. Our nervous systems stay in constant disarray, significantly impacting our ability to organize, resist and envision change. The result? A population both hypervigilant yet immobilized.
This dynamic serves our capitalist system perfectly: Exhausted and hopeless workers rarely fight for better conditions. While genuine human connection sustains us, the technological acceleration of exhaustion — driven by algorithmic manipulation and manufactured urgency — acts as a perfect delivery system for political and social burnout.
Understanding this as a tool of control transforms how we fight back. Our collective burnout isn’t an unfortunate side effect of modern life — it’s the intended outcome of a system that profits from our disengagement and our hyperproductivity. Declining rates of civic participation aren’t just about apathy — they’re symptoms of a systematically exhausted population.
When oppressive systems are used to isolate and exhaust us, carrying this heaviness together becomes an act of defiance. This means creating tangible support structures: rotating leadership roles in community organizations, establishing local mutual aid networks and building communication systems that don’t rely solely on privately owned social media platforms. It looks like community care collectives providing child care during organizing meetings, mental health support networks and taking turns monitoring political developments so everyone has a chance to rest.
Project 2025 isn’t just another political initiative — it’s a masterclass in overwhelming the public consciousness.
Consider Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid network that emerged in Brooklyn in response to the COVID-19 crisis; it has evolved into a vibrant online hub and ecosystem of care, bringing together a diverse group of community members. More than 3,000 individuals — from service workers and artists to software engineers and long-time residents — are collaborating to reimagine how to safeguard their collective well-being and address gaps through shared resources. At this critical moment, we must create systems that prevent burnout while ensuring consistent community support. This will require us to develop rotating volunteer schedules and implement “pause periods,” where different working groups take turns stepping back to rest and recover while others step forward. When resources are stretched thin, the answer isn’t pushing individuals harder — it’s weaving a more substantial web of mutual support through community partnerships and collaborative care networks. It is easy to fall back on individual responses to burnout — taking personal mental health days, practicing self-care or temporarily disconnecting from news and social media. While these actions are essential and provide relief, they can also reinforce the cycle of exhaustion. We return to our activism or the ebbs and flow of life, feeling guilty for stepping away or playing catch-up with the list of latest crises. The real power lies in building systems that make care and wellness a collective practice rather than an individual responsibility.
Our exhaustion was meant to isolate us; instead, it reveals the threads of our common struggles. It was designed to make us surrender; instead, it shows us exactly where to push back, what areas in our concepts of solidarity require mending. In recognizing our fatigue as deliberately engineered, we expose the system’s fundamental fear: that despite their best efforts to wear us down, we will always find ways to resist together.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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