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I used AI to help write this article. I’m not revealing this as a disclaimer, but as the reason I wrote it at all.
Like many of you, I had a multitude of tasks vying for my attention when I sat down to write this: assignments to complete, readings to absorb, and the persistent mental load of daily university and college life. So I asked my friend Claude to help – and the time I saved felt significant. Yet what struck me more than the convenience was the sense of relief. The efficiency was not merely useful; it was unexpectedly freeing – as though I had come up for air.
That feeling is worth sitting with. Because if offloading one task to a machine produces that much relief, what does that tell us about how much we carry every day?
Think about the last time you dreamt about missing an exam – that sick-to-your-stomach panic, the frantic mental arithmetic – only to wake up and realise you’re actually fine. There’s a fleeting moment of pure reprieve. Then reality sets in, and you’re back to mentally cataloguing everything you need to do that day.
There’s a reason moments of rest feel stolen rather than earned. There’s a reason the weekend “recovery period” isn’t really a choice, but a necessity after a week of performing, producing, and being present. And there’s a reason guilt lingers even during your downtime – quietly insisting you could be doing something more productive.
The reason is not a personal flaw. But we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe it is.
This is a product of the achievement society – a world that’s replaced external authority (“you should”) with something far more efficient: internal pressure (“you can”). When the compulsion for productivity turns inward, there’s no visible structure to question. There’s just a persistent, private sense that you could always be doing more. And this shift isn’t accidental – a person who drives their own productivity needs far less managing than one who must be told what to do. So when the promised rewards fall short of the effort invested (as they so often do, despite hard work), the disappointment feels personal rather than structural.
We aren’t the first generation to feel this way. Every wave of rapid social change has produced its own exhaustion epidemic: “neurasthenia” after industrialisation in the nineteenth century, “manager disease” during Germany’s post-war reconstruction in the 1950s, and clinically recognised burnout after the digitalisation boom of the 1990s. The through-line is consistent – transformation, pressure, fatigue. Now, AI is reshaping labour markets faster than most of us can track, the cost of living is outpacing wages, and the boundary between work and rest has quietly dissolved into the screen in your hand. I’m aware of the irony: the same technology that helped me write this article is also accelerating the very conditions it gave me relief from.
If history is any guide, we may not be at the end of a burnout epidemic, but instead at the beginning of the next.
And the system’s answer to all of this? Mindfulness.
Meditation apps. Breathing exercises. Corporate wellness programs. The counsellor who helps you “manage stress better.” These things aren’t cynical inventions – they’re often genuinely helpful, and the research supporting them is real. But there’s something worth noticing about these practices: they’re all directed inward.
The broader phenomenon has been dubbed “McMindfulness” – contemplative practices hollowed out and sold back to us as productivity tools; something to be purchased, not practised. The message beneath the ambient music of your guided meditation is clear: your inner resources should be inexhaustible.
According to this logic, the issue lies not in your circumstances, but in how you respond to them.
Helping people cope isn’t wrong. But when coping becomes the only available response to a collective problem, it’s worth asking why we’ve agreed to treat just the symptom while leaving the cause undisturbed.
I’m not arguing against ambition, hard work, or even meditation apps. The drive to achieve something meaningful isn’t the problem. The more interesting question is what sits underneath that drive: how much of it is freely chosen, and how much have we simply absorbed from a system that benefits from our constant self-improvement?
Some would go further – arguing that even the act of asking these questions risks becoming another performance of intellectual productivity, that there’s no position outside the system from which we can critique it cleanly. That may well be true. But I’m less interested in whether we can escape the system than in whether we’re paying attention to how it works – and whether, at the very least, that attention might be worth something.
I used AI to help write this. I saved time, felt relieved, and then spent the rest of the week thinking about why. That loop – use the tool, feel better, keep going – might be worth interrupting, just occasionally, to ask what we’re actually running towards.
