The burnout economy & my quest for a good night's sleep

It is 1:47 in the morning, and I am currently googling how quickly dementia symptoms show up in 29-year-old insomniacs.

Intellectually, I am aware that searching for the long-term health consequences of not sleeping (surprise, they’re negative!) is unlikely to help me fall asleep. But this has become a fairly regular part of my nighttime routine. I work too late, or stay up consuming short-form content on my phone in an effort to “relax,” become anxious about how little time I have left to sleep, and then spend the next several hours calculating the damage I am doing to my body by still being awake.

I think of my glorious, never-ending to do list. The emails I didn’t send, the text message I forgot to answer, something vaguely embarrassing I did two years ago. I do defensive simulation, and consider the possibility that I am falling behind everyone I know, although on what exactly, I couldn’t tell you.

Then I become aware that I am thinking too much, which introduces a new layer of thinking about how I should stop thinking.

I have always been a bad sleeper. Even as a kid, it took me a long time to fall asleep, but during COVID it turned into full-blown insomnia. Some nights, I slept for 45 minutes. Since then, I have tried most of the things you are supposed to try. None of it ever felt like it actually solved the problem.

I often fantasize about being professionally put to bed. I think about those beautiful, mysterious facilities celebrities check into when they are “overwhelmed,” where someone confiscates your phone, cooks all your meals, and tells everyone in your life that you are unavailable until further notice.

You … may be wondering what this has to do with personal finance. Quite a lot, actually.

Burnout and collective exhaustion is a personal finance and economic issue. When work erodes our ability to sleep, plan, focus, cook, socialize or regulate ourselves, we spend money replacing those capacities — and an enormous industry has emerged to sell them back to us.

The burnout economy & you

We’re currently living in what Vox recently called the “burnout economy”. Burnout, importantly, is not simply feeling tired after a difficult week. Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout, describes it as chronic exhaustion accompanied by cynicism and a sense that your work is no longer accomplishing anything. AKA it’s not something that just magically clears up after one restful weekend.

@zachary_abroadBurnout culture has reached all time levels in the USA, causing people to take vacation days to just … sleep. #burnout #costofliving #broke #movingabroad #jobsTiktok failed to load.

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Burnout has become so widespread that we use the same word to describe both occupational collapse and feeling sort of annoyed on a Tuesday. But the conditions are quite real: growing workloads, chronic understaffing, financial insecurity, fragmented attention and a workday that has expanded far beyond the hours for which most people are technically paid.

This explains why sleep is becoming the health and wellness industry’s newest consumer category (and status symbol). The fantasy of being professionally put to bed has, conveniently, become much easier to buy.

So you want to sleep better. It’s pretty simple. You just need to buy a weighted blanket, sleep mask, blackout curtain, cooling pillow, sleep tracking ring, smart mattress, sleep supplements, meditation app, air purifier, and maybe a white noise machine.

Still struggling? Maybe you need to hire an executive function coach to help you rebuild your planning and focus — abilities prolonged stress tends to destroy. Or maybe you just need a break. Hotels are increasingly offering “sleep tourism” packages built around the promise of doing almost nothing: soundproof rooms, pillow menus, weighted blankets, sleep doctors, AI-powered beds, special teas, breathing sessions, guided meditation and turndown rituals designed to gently escort you into unconsciousness.

We’ve essentially built an economy that works people past their capacity and then asks them to pay for their own rest.

A bad night of sleep has a financial afterlife

My insomnia does not end when I get out of bed. It follows me through the next day, changing what I am willing and able to do.

After a bad night, I am less patient, less organized and much less willing to tolerate inconvenience. I have less energy to cook, compare prices, make decisions, exercise restraint or handle any of the small administrative tasks required to keep a modern life running.

I’ve written previously about the adulting tax: the money we spend buying back the time and executive function that modern life consumes. Exhaustion makes this business model work better. Companies have learned that if they add enough friction, a tired customer will eventually accept the default, pay the fee or simply give up.

That maps pretty neatly onto my own financial behavior. When I am tired, I order food delivery because making dinner — checking what I have, going to the store, cooking and cleaning — feels impossible. I often impulsively book vacations because I am convinced that if I can just get away from my life for a few days, I will return as a fundamentally different person.

I have probably spent thousands of dollars trying to make my exhaustion more manageable, through the accumulated cost of delivery fees, transportation, abandoned returns, trips, supplements, apps and small conveniences that become increasingly easy to justify when I am running on fumes.

Burnout also changes our financial behavior in other ways. People avoid, they procrastinate, they struggle to initiate tasks, they numb themselves or engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms. Or, in my case, they try to work through it, which can temporarily look productive while making everything worse.

The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy 12 billion working days and roughly $1 trillion in lost productivity each year. But individual households absorb the costs first, through lost income, convenience spending, medical care, therapy, time off and all of those small purchases you made.

The job follows you into bed

So why are so many of us willing to keep operating this way?

I have written before about workism, the American belief that a job should provide not only money but proof that we matter. I work, therefore I have value.

Work takes up an enormous amount of our mental and emotional bandwidth. We rely on our jobs for income, healthcare, status, identity, purpose, and future security, so even when we’re not working, we’re often thinking about work, worrying about work, or measuring ourselves through work. This is why burnout is so common.

Plus, in recent years, the modern workday has bled into most of our day. Microsoft described what it calls the “infinite workday”: employees checking email early in the morning, moving through a fragmented day of meetings and messages, and then returning to their inboxes late at night.

Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout, told me in an interview that we often describe nearly every valuable part of life using the language of employment. Marriage is work. Parenting is work. Mental health is work.

Obviously, all of those things can require enormous effort. But, as Malesic put it, understanding them as valuable only to the extent that they resemble employment is “a real failure of imagination.”

I am a prime example of this. I regularly work 12- or 13-hour days. I work on vacation. When I am not working, I am often thinking about work, which means I can be physically present with my friends while mentally rearranging the next day’s to-do list.

While there are some external pressures driving my workaholism, most of it is internal. I want very badly to be perceived as someone who can do it all: productive, informed, financially responsible, physically healthy, emotionally self-aware, socially engaged, responsive to email.

The problem with wanting to do it all is that “all” does not exist. There is always something else you could be doing, improving, answering, organizing or turning into evidence that you are a serious person.

The economy that exhausts you also sells you the cure

America’s answer to burnout is largely market-based.

You work until you cannot focus, and then hire an executive-function coach. You lose the ability to sleep, then book a sleep retreat. You spend the day sitting under artificial light and the evening under red light because somebody on TikTok told you it will fix your mitochondria or whatever.

Last year, I was talking to a Dutch acquaintance who told me she was on paid burnout leave from her job in Amsterdam. I was shocked that this was even an option.

She was equally confused by my reaction and asked, What do Americans do when they burn out?

I thought about it.

“Keep going?” I said.

In the United States, recovery from burnout often happens while you continue performing the work that caused it, unless you are financially secure enough to quit, take unpaid leave or temporarily remove yourself.

Malesic told me that many people often start focusing on compensation when something else in the job has gone deeply wrong. But “you can’t earn your way out of burnout,” he said.

More money can solve many real problems. It can provide housing, safety, childcare, health care and the financial ability to leave. But it cannot necessarily compensate for work that consumes your identity, violates your values or leaves you unable to participate in the rest of your life.

Some of the most miserable working periods of my life were also some of the most lucrative. Earning more didn’t make me happier, it just made it easier to pay for delivery, vacations and conveniences that helped me maintain it.

We’ve created an economy often built around long and unpredictable hours, understaffed workplaces, financial insecurity, constant availability and a culture that treats exhaustion as a sign of importance. Then we built a consumer market around helping individuals deal with it.

The WHO identifies excessive workloads, understaffing, inflexible hours, low control, inadequate pay, job insecurity and conflict between work and home as major risks to mental health. The logical response would be to change working conditions, and yet most of the cultural messaging is aimed at the individual. You just need to set better boundaries. Or meditate. Improve your morning routine. Buy this red light lamp! Buy this wellness app! Everything will be OK.

Everything feels like a job

Once recovery becomes something you buy, it is only a matter of time before it becomes something you optimize.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the way we have begun treating the self like a startup in need of continuous iteration. The body, in this way, has become the last investable asset. Your appearance, diet, fertility, focus, energy, longevity and sleep are all variables that can allegedly be measured, improved and monetized. There is always another habit to adopt, metric to watch or product to buy.

Sleep may be the purest expression of this logic because it is one of the few things humans are supposed to accomplish while unconscious. And boy, have we managed to make it complicated.

There are readiness scores, sleep scores, sunrise clocks, cooling systems, mouth tape, magnesium drinks, sleepmaxxing routines and “morning sheds,” in which people wake up and remove the masks, wraps, patches, chin straps and pieces of tape they applied before bed.

This is essentially what happened when I tracked my sleep. Every morning felt like I was getting a graded test back. I could wake up feeling physically fine, see a bad score and immediately begin spiraling about what it meant for the rest of the day. Sleep doctors call this orthosomnia: The pressure to improve the numbers can itself create anxiety and worsen insomnia, particularly for people already prone to perfectionism.

The harder I tried to optimize rest, the more work I created for myself.

I used to joke that if I could choose any superpower, I would choose not needing to sleep, like Edward Cullen. Just eight additional hours every day, so I could get more work done. Even in my fantasy of becoming superhuman, the only thing I could imagine doing with the extra life was working more.

How sad is that?

What counts as rest?

I spend most of the day looking at a medium-sized screen and then “relax” by alternating between a smaller screen in my hand and a much larger screen mounted to the wall.

I lie down because I am too tired to do anything else, then spend 45 minutes watching other people reorganize their apartments, perform their routines, improve their bodies and tell me what I should buy.

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Because this requires very little physical effort, it feels like rest. But my brain is still taking in information, comparing, deciding and being advertised to. Even outside work, my attention remains economically productive: I am an audience member, a consumer, a data point and a potential customer.

This is not an argument that scrolling is morally inferior to reading Tolstoy beside a lake. Sometimes watching four hours of television is exactly what I want to do, and sometimes that’s fine. But low-effort consumption is not automatically restorative.

I have been thinking about the difference between collapse, numbing and rest.

• Collapse happens when you have exhausted your available capacity and your body effectively refuses additional demands.
• Numbing temporarily makes the exhaustion less noticeable.
• Rest gives some portion of your capacity back: your curiosity, patience, creativity, attention or desire to be around other people.

The same activity can perform any of those functions depending on the person and the day. The question is how you actually feel after you do something. I think for most people, consuming hours of short-form content does not make them feel more alert and awake after.

There’s also a difference between resting and being idle. As one recent essay inThe Idle Gazette argues, capitalism can tolerate rest because rest can be justified as maintenance: you recharge now so you can work better later. Idleness is more threatening because it does not promise a return to working. It’s time that does not need to make you healthier, more creative or more productive.

I am not particularly good at that kind of time.

On the rare occasions when I feel genuinely restored, I am calmer and more creative. I am more interested in other people. I can sit through dinner without half my brain shuffling through tomorrow’s to-do list.

I often feel this way on vacation, partly because distance disrupts my routine, but also because vacation provides a temporary narrative that makes rest feel earned. I am allowed to stop because stopping is the official purpose of the trip.

But vacation is not reality. Eventually, I return to the same life, the same habits and the same belief that time not visibly used is time I have somehow wasted.

Going on a sleep vacation is less about lying on a better mattress than it is allowing yourself silence, privacy, time, autonomy and unavailability — the conditions many people need to rest. Except now you have to pay a premium for it.

The unresolved question

I wish I could tell you that researching this changed my behavior. Because as of writing, it has not!

I still work too much. I still interpret a day without visible output as a day I failed to use properly. I still understand exactly what I am doing while apparently remaining unable (or perhaps unwilling) to stop doing it.

The recovery economy is not imposed on us from some random, far-off location. It works because it gives people like me an appealing compromise. I don’t have to actually work less; I can buy something that helps me withstand working more.

I don’t have to question why productivity makes me feel valuable. I can just optimize my sleep, book a vacation or pay for enough convenience to make the whole arrangement temporarily sustainable.

I can criticize the system while continuing to receive status, money and identity from succeeding inside it. In fact, the more successful I become inside that system, the more resources I have to purchase relief from its consequences.

I know by now that my problem is probably not confined to my bedroom. It’s so much larger than that — my relationship with ambition, my feelings about productivity and value, and what defines a truly successful life.

So I’m sort of left with a question I don’t yet know how to answer:

If I know that I need a different relationship with work, am I actually willing to change the life I have built?

Or am I going to just book the sleepcation?

it’s not relaxing.

For the sake of everyone involved, I am not going to tell you what the scenarios are. I later learned in therapy that mentally rehearsing terrible outcomes can be an attempt to make uncertainty feel less threatening and create an illusion of control. As an FYI, this does not actually make you feel any more in control.