Dear reader,Last week, I lost count of the people who used the word “exhausted” in conversation with me. Two parents at a function used it within five minutes of meeting me, a friend at the gym said it between sets, a bank manager said it with a half-laugh, a lawyer who also runs an environmental campaign said it three times in one phone call, and a clutch of my students said it almost in chorus, half-apologising for it. By Sunday, the word had detached itself from its old meaning and become a sort of social greeting, the way “busy” used to function a decade ago. And nobody pauses to explain it anymore. They just say it and move on.The strange part is that almost none of these people do heavy physical work. They sit at desks, stare at screens, drive cars, take walks they call workouts. As I see it, their fatigue does not come from the body. It comes from something else, harder to name, that runs unnoticed in urban life now and has begun to seep into the small towns and aspiring villages too. The boy preparing for an entrance exam in Chennai, the young woman on her first job in Bengaluru, the auto driver juggling trips on three different apps, the schoolteacher in Kochi whose principal has just added a wellness module to her timetable. Different lives, same fatigue.What the new economy asks of them is not labour in the old sense; it is continuous self-management, and it never ends. People are tracking their sleep, scoring their workouts, optimising their salaries into SIPs, side hustles and emergency funds whose adequacy is itself a source of anxiety, upgrading their careers every two or three years because the industry mutates faster than that, and ferrying their children through coaching pipelines so that they become “future-ready”, a phrase that hides an entire economy of dread. Attention itself, the most ordinary thing a person has, has discreetly been turned into work.The older middle-class bargain promised that disciplined effort would deliver some stability at the other end. That promise has diminished into almost nothing. Salaries no longer reliably buy housing in the cities they are earned in, professional prestige decays at strange speeds, and a skill that took ten years to build can be casually outsourced to an algorithm in an afternoon. So, people compensate. They optimise harder. The insecurity produces more discipline, the discipline produces more exhaustion, and somewhere in the loop the original promise disappears.The gym belongs to this story. Not because there is anything wrong with a gym, there isn’t, but listen to the language around it now. People do not go for pleasure, they go for “discipline”, they go to stay employable, for validation, for healing, to tune their bodies for the market. Therapy language has gone through a parallel shift—what started as a vocabulary of liberation has been absorbed into the workplace, and burnout is treated as a productivity bug to be debugged in the worker rather than a signal about the work itself.If you have noticed, the young professional now behaves like a small hedge fund, managing risk across career, identity, relationships, even hobbies—the SIP, the side hustle, the LinkedIn profile updated with the discipline of a daily prayer. Reading becomes content consumption, walking becomes a step count, friendship turns into networking adjacency. Even rest now demands a justification.Then there is the information layer, perhaps the heaviest of all. Earlier generations could remain politically distant or involved without feeling morally implicated by their distance or involvement, and that option has been withdrawn. Every morning the phone delivers a fresh payload, and last week’s was unusually loud—Iran and Israel trading missiles again, the Ukraine war in its fourth winter, oil markets jumping on every rumour out of the Strait of Hormuz, and back home a steep petrol hike that pushed prices in Kerala past Rs.115 a litre, breaking a four-year freeze. Add the daily background score of louder films, louder anchors, and the special Indian art form of two strangers shouting at each other on social media until one of them blocks the other and considers it a victory. Educated people sit inside a strange trap now. Too informed to feel calm. Too embedded to switch off.The air gets worse, the road gets worse, the water comes for fewer hours, universities and educational institutions lose credibility year by year, and the news ecosystem has split into propaganda and counter-propaganda so completely that an ordinary citizen is now expected to moonlight as a full-time fact-checker.Through all of this, the individual is told that success remains a private discipline. Structural failure is converted, by a familiar sleight of hand, into personal responsibility. If you are tired, the implication runs, you have simply not optimised hard enough.Franco Berardi, the Italian thinker who calls himself Bifo, has been writing about this for two decades, and his term for it is semiocapitalism—the “semio” coming from semiotics, the study of signs. The new economy, he argues, does not mainly extract value from muscles, it extracts value from attention, emotion, language, and nervous response.The factory worker of an earlier age went home at the end of a shift. The cognitive worker of today carries the workplace inside her head, processes signals, performs optimism on social media, and keeps her nervous system mobilised so that when the notification arrives, she can respond in seconds. The mind is the assembly line now. Berardi’s claim, written long before the AI panic, is that human nervous systems evolved at a slower speed than what the economy now demands, and the gap between the two is where panic, depression and a strange ambient numbness are produced.Nowhere does this exhaustion economy show its hand more brutally than in what we have done to our children, and to the entrance exam that has come to stand for everything wrong with the bargain we have struck. Frontline has examined this at length before, and most recently Soni Mishra’s interview with the educationist Anita Rampal makes the case concrete in a way no theory can.Rampal, who chaired the NCERT Textbook Development Committee at the primary stage under the 2005 National Curriculum Framework and spent nearly two decades at the Department of Education at Delhi University, has argued for years that NEET in its current form is, in her own blunt words, not fair, not just, and not meaningful. The exam takes so much out of a young person—motivation, money, family resources, the very sense of self—that what is being tested at the end of it is no longer aptitude or vocation but the capacity to survive a brutalising machine.Watch the video interview here.Through Rampal’s argument, every detail of the exhaustion economy comes into sharper focus—the disciplined parents pouring lakhs into coaching classes they cannot afford, the 17-year-old measuring her self-worth in mock-test percentiles, the school reduced to a holding pen on the way to the many exams. The point Rampal makes is that none of this teaches anyone medicine. It only teaches them how to be exhausted.What we should think about now is how we can rescue time. And rediscover it for ourselves. To do whatever we want with it. Or to not do anything at all. To not let the economy bully us into being busy all the time.This is where I want to leave you this week.Encouraging you to step down from the treadmill for a bit.Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS