Layers of exhaustion

This summer has been particularly hard on me. I don’t handle heat and humidity very well, and July and August have been devastating in this regard where I live. Like I wrote in my previous article about a month ago, what little energy I could save was mainly devoted to work. But I had to take a break from that too, so I enjoyed some holiday time in August. I went to Madrid and Toledo, where the temperatures were even higher than in Valencia, often reaching 40–41 degrees Celsius, but at least there was little humidity. Dry heat is much more tolerable for me. So at least I had enough energies to take long walks, snap photos, and enjoy being a tourist with my wife.

In this world, today so ever-obsessed with technology and productivity, when you complain of physical exhaustion some people will inevitably think you’re kind of exaggerating; almost as if it were some lame, unimaginative excuse to justify your general poor performance. But the exhaustion caused by a very hot and suffocatingly humid climate can be something alarmingly draining. (If you have lived all your life in a country that has this kind of climate by default, all year round, it’s clearly a different story, as you will be accustomed to it and you’ll probably be able to function better in it). Worse, it often leads to mental exhaustion as well. Unless you find some form of protection against the heat and humidity (ventilation, air conditioning), your nights will likely be restless, with intermittent sleep; and we all know by now how important long hours of uninterrupted sleep are for our mental health and balance. Sadly, a lot of my days these past two months have been spent in a generally listless stupor, the sleep disruption of the night being deeply felt during the day, in a state resembling jet lag or mild drunkenness.

For a creative person as myself, this is the stuff of nightmares. This is the worst kind of creative block: it has very little to do with what you’re trying to create — it’s a force majeure type of block stopping you in your tracks no matter what you were trying to do. Sure, you know it’s not your fault, but that doesn’t take anything away from the same resulting feeling of utter frustration and anger boiling inside of you. And you can’t even act this frustration out because you’re too fucking exhausted to do so. How ironic.

There is also another depressing realisation sprinkled on top: that while you’re suffering this kind of climate-induced physical and mental exhaustion, you’re wasting a lot of your time. And this is not the productivity-obsessed mindset speaking. It’s not like thinking, I’m wasting all this time I could spend working or doing more soul-crushing grind. More simply, it’s thinking, I’m wasting all this time I could spend… truly living and having fun and being happy. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, leaving a bunch of weeks behind where you couldn’t do almost anything can surely be annoying. But when you’re older and you’re starting to enter that phase in your life where you realise time is a truly scarily finite resource and you should do the best you can to savour every moment, all the time you lose to exhaustion feels like a criminal waste and a horrible punishment at the same time.

Every time I go quieter on this site and on social media, I routinely receive little messages from concerned parties asking me— well, some of them at least start by asking how I’m doing. Others are more interested in knowing why I haven’t shared my opinion on the Hot Tech Topic Of The Day.

I have been able to keep up with the main tech news this summer, and honestly, that’s the other layer of exhaustion I’ve been experiencing. You see, I gladly analyse and criticise things in tech when there are interesting enough things to analyse and criticise. But tech news have felt so utterly samey for a while now. Rumours about the hardware Apple will introduce in September and October. Some new proposed law that’s pissing off some tech company and all their fanpeople. Hackers doing more hacking. Some new apps — the flow of cool innovative apps is now sadly reduced to a trickle — which force subscription on you as the sole method of sustaining them. A new folding phone comes out, same as the old folding phone. And is the iPad capable of replacing a Mac? (Not again.) And where is the iPad headed? (Not again!) Is spatial computing The Future??? Blah blah blah.

Technology today is in the boring part of the curve. The part where the curve is almost flat. The exhaustion part. There’s the occasional spark, but the industry is at its most iterative at the moment, generally speaking. So I find increasingly hard to be excited about something in tech. The gaming world might be a small exception, but you really have to look for gems in a landscape that, here too, feels mostly iterative: hardware-wise, you get spec bumps that improve how games look and perform. Creatively, and when it comes to triple‑A titles, sometimes it feels just like Hollywood — a landscape dominated by franchises, sequels, and, uh, stuff designed to make you waste money.

Changing subject, another reason I’ve been quieter on social media is because the situation couldn’t be more fragmented. I’m currently more active on Mastodon, where a fair amount of mutual friends and followers from my Twitter/X network of people have been landing since Elon Musk started actively destroying Twitter. But on that shipwreck of a platform there are still a lot of people I care about and want to interact with. I’ve found this fracture to be very detrimental to the way I engage with social media on a daily basis. As I wrote on Mastodon, when Twitter was the platform everyone was on, it brought a positive flow in my day-to-day. It was quicker and easier to check on people, keep up with what they shared, interact. Now it’s more like, Oh, let’s have a quick look over there, see how everyone’s doing. Everything is more sporadic and inertial. Attention is also a finite resource, and the more you disrupt and fragment it, the less you see of the overall picture.

To circle back to the original subject, exhaustion, and conclude, at this point you might be wondering about coping mechanisms. The disarming truth is that I’ve handled this exhaustion poorly. When you can’t sleep well at night, and feel sleepy and tired during the day, when you can’t concentrate and feel utterly useless, you really have very little energy left to muster any kind of meaningful reaction. I felt mostly resigned and finding a tiny tiny comfort in thinking that “This too shall pass”, but the general anxiety coming from watching time melt away, drowned and drenched in days that felt almost more routine‑y than when I’m knee-deep in work, was really overpowering.

As for tech exhaustion… it’s ultimately just a phase — which is lasting longer than in previous periods of time when innovation felt like an unstoppable force. In photography and music, there seems to be a trend where people are appreciating more and more a return to more ‘analogue’ habits, mindsets, and æsthetics. I’ve been doing the same even before it was cool, because I basically never stopped listening and buying vinyl records, CDs, and MiniDiscs. And I never really stopped engaging in film photography with 40–50-year-old equipment. With writing, I’m trying to go back to using pen & paper even more than before, as I found many many times that this really improves my creative process.

The return to more analogue and tactile ways of enjoyment and creation isn’t posturing for me, at all. Generally speaking, technology today wants to envelop us in immateriality. The more we are reduced to data, to numbers, to digital profiles, to code, the more we can be controlled and influenced. Material objects, and habits that can extract us from that sea of digital immateriality as frequently as possible, may be our most precious anchors against all this depersonalisation — which interestingly enough also appears at the intersection between technology and exhaustion.