Why are you so tired all the time?: Kashyap Kompella breaks it down

A nagging feeling of inadequacy then creeps in. There is the sense, at least occasionally, that one is not being the best version of oneself, in one’s various roles (parent, partner, co-worker, caregiver).

How did we begin to hurtle this much?

Some of it can be traced to messaging that goes as far back as the 1850s.

It is interesting to note that what is widely considered the world’s first self-help book, Self-Help (a book on self-improvement and perseverance; translated into several languages, including many Indian ones) was released in 1859, as the industrial revolution sped up.

Ever since, there has been a push to “have it all” which has really been a push to “do it all”. Pop psychology has underlined, over and over, the idea that one can be whatever one wants to be (as long as what one wants to be is busy).

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Two things have grown dramatically, amid this drive to speed things up: the number of “busy” hours, and the number of people we know.

The average person knew between a few dozen and 200 people in the pre-industrial world. Today, researchers estimate that each of us knows about 600 people by name.

From a world in which there was little to do after sundown, and only darkness to do it in — a world in which the only establishments open all night were the local church or temple, and a disreputable pub — we live in a world of 24x7 everything.

There is all-night delivery, round-the-clock nightlife, stores and banks that stay open online, and films available on-demand. Most of all, we are in a world, particularly post-pandemic, of a 24x7 workday.

So much so that it feels like one must run as fast as one can, just to stay in the same place. (Even if all one is trying to do is stay abreast of recent streaming releases.)

There is a physical fallout to this: rest, sleep and time to repair are casualties. This isn’t an accidental outcome. As Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings once put it, his streaming platform’s prime competitor isn’t another network. Its prime competitor is sleep.

Meanwhile, self-worth, and indeed net worth, have become so tied to knowing it all (in a world of constantly refreshing feeds) and doing it all (in a world of endlessly enticing activity), that it is hard to resist the Pied Piper. But he’s moving faster and faster into the distance.

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Is it any wonder we’re anxious and lonely? No one feels like they will ever “have it all”. While one may superficially know more people than in the past, our loved ones have become remote icons on WhatsApp groups. Our communities are fragmented and shifting.

We are privy to what is happening around the world, in a way that would have seemed like science-fiction even 30 years ago. Yet all this has done is deplete our empathy and leave us fatigued (and angry or worried or hopeless, or all four).

As the world marches to the tunes of the profit-hungry Pied Pipers of the attention economy, the true sources of solace are only fleetingly available. We freeze our eggs and hope to start a family “someday”; silence calls from our parents and loved ones, and often fail to return them.

We schedule dinners and celebrations we know we’ll never attend.

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I spent my school summer holidays in my grandparents’ village in coastal Andhra Pradesh.

We spent the days eating munjus (ice apples) and mangoes. All the visiting cousins slept outdoors, under the stars, and played simple games that blended seamlessly into each other, as evening turned to moonlight.

Our holidays were not filled with early coaching classes or extra-curricular activities strategically chosen for a future Ivy League college application.

In a less-connected world, our joys and ambitions were simpler.

And while the rise of the cult of the individual has meant freedom for so many, perhaps it is time to ask: Is there a way to have both prosperity and contentment?

The answer, I believe, is yes. But in order to begin down that road, we need to build the confidence to start marching to our own inner drummer.

We have to more deliberately choose the level of our entrenchments in the attention economy, the extinction economy — in all the systems that benefit from us believing it is better to sleep less and consume more, and vital to compete not just with Sharmaji’s son but also with Sherman Jr in the US.

We have to stop being in the attention business ourselves.

Stop the helicopter parenting, tiger parenting and performative posting; stop wishing our spouses happy anniversary on Instagram, and planning vacations around the Reels we will share.

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Late-stage capitalism has cast us all as the central characters in our own plotlines, and that has benefits. But these benefits are eroded when the primary motivation moves from individual choice to hyper-consumption.

A shift back to deliberate choice is vital.

I was amused to see the need for this expressed in an unlikely quarter — in hashtags posted by youngsters online. Starting in February, as ambitious (and often consumption-driven) bucket-list goals started to fall apart, as they do each year, social media posts began to replace the hashtag #bucketlist with a new one, the f**k-it list, which consists of little notes on things the individual simply isn’t going to care about any more.

Typical examples included gym and weight goals, others’ opinions, and “the need to be nice all the time”.

This rebellious, contra list could finally begin to counter FOMO, a concept that has haunted us since a while before the term was coined in 2004 (by Patrick McGinnis, while he was a student at Harvard Business School).

The f**k-it list could ease the exhaustion that comes from living like a modern-day Sisyphus, checking to-dos off a list not even of our own making.

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I’d like to end with a post-script. Have you noticed the chorus of CEOs around the world, asking employees to dedicate more hours, to help make their companies great again?

There are echoes here too of the early years of the industrial revolution. In a time of new technology and uncertain futures, it is often said that we all need to do more for the greater good.

But in an economy defined by infinite growth, no amount of more will do the job.

It is time to shift from “more” to “different”. In a time of admittedly great abundance and personal wealth — a world in which the average person is healthier, safer and better-fed than at any time in human history — lay claim to that ultimate luxury: the ability to decide what to do with your time.

Break out of Schrodinger’s jail, where one is simultaneously prisoner and jailor.

Do what matters to you; not your audience, presumed audience, peers or enviers.

Do it not as performative action or for the shallow praise of strangers, but from a sense of deliberate choice.

Start with a fundamental admission: You will never get to the end of that list of things to do, watch, know, listen to, and be.

Internalise this and you liberate yourself.