“The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes that many of us spend our lives “preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.”

We’re expected to “grind” endlessly in our pursuit. And if we feel overwhelmed, there are dozens of others lined up for a shot at our job. In the modern workplace, we give away any sense of autonomy in exchange for the right to grind for a few extra bucks. As work infiltrates all aspects of life, we are actively training learned helplessness.

I often only feel I have worked enough if, at the end of the day, I am bone-tired and wrung out. The team who designed the original Macintosh computer wore T-shirts boasting WORKING 90 HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT! This could be the insane slogan for our professional class. Many of us have built our identities around working to the point of exhaustio

Concerned about “the thousand intricate problems . . . which perplex those who struggle to-day in our teeming city hives,” the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell wondered, “Have we lived too fast?” He published Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked not in 2021, but in 1871. Mitchell is one of the men responsible for diagnosing an epidemic of hys