The Burnout Economy

Most Americans are drowning.

We're some of the most productive humans on the planet, yet we cannot afford housing. Productivity remains at all-time highs while wages remain stagnant. 63% of Americans cannot afford a $500 emergency expense. Our birth rate has plummeted towards the floor as raising a family becomes economically impossible for most workers, especially when both parents are likely to work full-time jobs and are both unable to afford childcare or afford to quit a job to be a stay-at-home parent while still making rent or mortgage payments.

This isn't news.

The solution to these woes, according to the media? Boosting productivity, working longer hours, grinding side hustles, taking gig work. It's never about forcing profitable firms to retain workers instead of laying them off for a share bump, or applying price controls to the medications we need or the food we eat, or banning no-fault evictions or taxing wealthy homeowners appropriately to incentivize more builds, or funding universal healthcare and childcare through sensible tax reforms.

The solution is always the same: work harder, you filthy layabout.

America has devolved into a burnout economy. The constant pressure to deliver more value in less time, with less humans, for less money, has been unrelenting for decades. Americans have to fight outsourcing to contractors, offshoring to foreign countries, exploitative visa schemes that depress domestic wages with international workers (and trap them in a form of indentured servitude by forcing them to obey their employer or be deported back home), at-will employment laws, unnecessary layoffs, corporate consolidation, rampant M&As, and governments hostile to their own workers, all in an effort to try and earn enough money to make ends meet for one more month. The recent introduction of AI into the mix is only accelerating these anxieties, to the point that mental health professionals are raising alarms about workforce anxiety around total replacement - or "Fear of Becoming Obsolete (FOBO)".

What's also emerging, however, is how AI itself is creating even more pronounced burnout in even its most ardent users and supporters. It appears that whether you're an AI supporter or AI resister, both are being burnt to a crisp in the name of Capital.

The crisis in America isn't merely the cost of living or the precarity of work: it's about an economic engine run so hot, so lean, so devoid of any safety rails whatsoever that it's at risk of violent explosion. If the American workers are the red-lined engine in a car screaming for relief and wrenching itself apart inside the engine compartment, Capital is the driver pressing the accelerator to the floor anyway and refusing to shift gears, having deferred the requisite fluid changes and maintenance schedule for half a century.

Americans literally cannot work themselves any harder out of this mess without killing ourselves - something already happening long before COVID entered the picture, and skyrocketing since. This is especially pronounced in our young people, a cohort that has regularly faced employment challenges at the start of their careers for successive generations and also sees itself most affected by premature death in midlife due to drugs, alcohol, or outright suicide. The response to this rising trend? Blocking discussion of suicide, dismantling mental health assistance for at-risk groups, legalize gambling in sports and prediction markets; make it as difficult as possible to get help and as easy as possible to hurt yourself, while shaming you for not buying homes or having kids.

This is not a sustainable economic model. We're not even throwing ourselves into the gears of Capital for a higher quality of life anymore, as evidenced by the polycrisis mentioned at the start and which frustratingly omits global issues like geopolitical conflicts, climate change, child exploitation, genocide campaigns, rising authoritarianism, mass surveillance, and misuse of nonrenewable resources. For all the bluster about how young people should be somehow grateful for avocado toast and iPhones, the data and protests and policies of these cohorts routinely suggest that we'd gladly give them up for the same quality of life we enjoyed in our youth - or that our parents had, at the very least.

America is not an economy of innovation, but exploitation. Burnout isn't merely a symptom, it's the intentional design of Capital and Government alike: turn workers into disposable tissues, have them piss in bottles to maximize productivity, pay them as little as possible regardless of their ability to survive, and fire them via AI as soon as practical.

This is the burnout economy.