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An Exhausting Year in (and Out of) the Office
After successive waves of post-pandemic change, worn-out knowledge workers need a fresh start.
By Cal Newport, Dec 27, 2023
from The New Yorker
It’s been almost four years since the coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a period of sustained upheaval for knowledge workers. The first wave of change came in early 2021, with the Great Resignation—a mass exodus from the workforce that saw, at its peak, millions of Americans quitting their jobs each month. Then, in 2022, we got the Remote-Work Wars, in which bosses who’d thought of working from home as a temporary measure were surprised when employees claimed it as a right. “Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do,” a group of disgruntled Apple employees wrote in a letter to management after their C.E.O., Tim Cook, proposed repopulating the company’s offices, including its headquarters, which had opened only five years earlier at a cost of five billion dollars.
Eventually, in many organizations, the fervor of the Remote-Work Wars settled into an uneasy truce that was based on hybrid schedules. But then, last summer, a third wave of disruption emerged. “I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting,” the narrator of a viral TikTok video began. “You’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.” Many young professionals embraced the idea, filling social platforms with sympathetic declarations before they, in turn, weathered a derisive backlash. The over-all impression, throughout these years of turbulence, was that knowledge work was broken: somehow, its expectations, rhythms, and burdens needed to be redefined.
Today, at the close of 2023, there no longer seems to be a revolutionary project roiling the knowledge sector. The business-news cycle is dominated by coverage of A.I. or old-fashioned labor strikes, with little apparent excitement left for reforming knowledge work as a whole. Office workers seem to have retreated into a pervasive atmosphere of fatigue. “I just feel that I am tired of working,” a representative post on the /r/work subreddit reads. “I am tired of meetings, brainstorming, expectations, dealing with people, figuring out never-ending problems.” The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.
How can we understand this vibe of weary disappointment? It’s useful to start with a simple question: What instigated these successive waves of knowledge-work disruption in the first place? The obvious answer is the pandemic, which introduced significant new strains into professional life, from the deranging challenges of juggling child care and work to the dulling ennui of domestic confinement. But, even as these specific pressures began to lessen, the mood of frustration only increased. Something deeper seemed to be unfolding.
Beyond the showy disruptions generated by the pandemic’s arrival was a more subtle but arguably even more important trend: a sharp increase in how much time the average knowledge worker engages in digital communication.
