Yes, Often The Goal Is Actually To Exhaust You

Politics. Work. Media. Sometimes even friendship. What now?

The most obvious application of this headline is around a lot of white-collar work, where executives and VP-level drones claim to care about “stress” and “burnout” and “doing more with less,” but in reality most of that ilk prefers work that way, because if you’re constantly in fight or flight and worried about basic needs like rent and groceries, you’re more beholden to them — and thus, the theory goes, more “productive.” Basically, to summarize that run-on sentence: exhaustion is seen as the enemy, or rather presented as the enemy, but in reality it’s typically the goal.

Now we can apply this to politics too. It’s easy to blame everything on Trump, and I don’t particularly want to do that, although the 2012 Presidential election, flawed as it was, might be the last time that two candidates seemed to come onto a stage and begin the proceedings with a show of mutual respect, albeit begrudging. Trump 1.0 (“45”) was meandering in many respects, but Trump 2.0 (“47”) has taken pages from the “move fast and break things” playbook, and it can seem like a lot of stability is being dismantled in the name of anger over established institutions (and regulations).

Taylor Lorenz, who I believe has been “cancelled” several times at this point but I am frankly too lazy and self-absorbed to keep up anymore, has a video of note around this: