you are exhausted because life is pain

you feel tired all the time because the conditions of your existence are unbearable

Exhaustion is now a discourse.

Listen. Listen to me and understand: you are exhausted because your species was a mistake. You are exhausted because life is pain. You are exhausted because for 200,000 years we evolved to run the plains like the wild animals we were, our social circles 10 or 12 people at most, and now our conditions have changed so quickly that evolution can’t keep up, so we sift through our thousands of human connections spellbound by the impossibility of maintaining them all as we sit in our cramped and sterile apartments in crowded cities that were never meant to exist. Once we were animals. Now we are something much worse.

We exist for no reason. We are born against our will, pulled screaming into a terrifying and cold world. As children we experience humiliation and fear. As we grow we learn that everything that once enchanted us is a lie. We are forced to spend more and more of our time preparing to secure or securing a minimal material survival. We watch our principles and dreams fall down around us like confetti at a ticker tape parade. We are forced to endure the drudgery and meaninglessness of work. We come to realize that disappointment is the default state of human life. We experience the horrors of aging. We inevitably die, usually in terrible pain and terror. There is no afterlife waiting for us and no God to give the whole thing meaning. That is why you are tired.

The conditions of modern affluent Western life have nothing to do with your exhaustion, save this: you are privileged enough to believe you were owed something better. You were born by cruel chance, and you’ll die by terrible certainty, and you will be exhausted for the rest of your life.