Isn’t it annoying when people write or talk like that? “It is the opinion of this reviewer that… blah blah blah.” Weird and professional-sounding third person bullshit. But it was cool when Walter Cronkite did it as he urged the U.S. government to end the Vietnam War. Kinda badass. So, in the opinion of this writer [me], there are a few different types of exhaustion that one can feel. They have different vibes, different severities, different timespans, and different solutions. So let’s talk about that.
The first is physical exhaustion. Classic. Depending on the circumstances, it might not even feel that bad. It can feel kind of satisfying, in a way. Maybe there’s a physical activity that you enjoy, like playing basketball. And maybe you played a bunch of basketball today, and now your arms, legs, and feet are sore. Your whole body is just sore and worn out. You’re exhausted, but after a shower and a drink, your exhaustion feels more satisfying as you reflect upon your great day. Unless you lost every game. Then you’re just pissed off.
So the satisfying version of physical exhaustion is very precarious. Doing something you enjoy, like basketball, is one way to make it more likely to be a good form of exhaustion. But even then, it doesn’t work forever. If you play basketball all day everyday, eventually the satisfied exhaustion runs out, and you just feel good-old-fashioned exhaustion of your physical body. You are spent. You need rest. So you rest. It’s all you can do. You need a day off, just to chill.
And there are other ways in which exhaustion can feel “good,” for lack of me thinking of a better word. Working out is a good type of exhaustion. It can help improve your sleep, which is a big reason why I’ve been working out more during the last few months. It works… okay for me. Also sex can lead to a fulfilling form of exhaustion, though that depends [for me] on the connection with the partner. If it’s only a physical connection, even if the sex is really good, I end up feeling more empty than fulfilled. But hey, we don’t need to talk any further about my sex life.
Obviously there are times when physical exhaustion just plain sucks. Like driving for a long time. You ever drive for hours and hours? Your legs and eyes are sore, your whole body just feels bad, and you finally get to your hotel room and you’re just like, “I am DONE.” And you just collapse on the hotel bed. Also just work in general. That shit can have you physically exhausted at 5:30, unable to really enjoy yourself. I haven’t even worked serious, hard manual labor stuff. I’ve worked some jobs that were more physically intensive and it still was fucking draining sometimes.
Okay, the next one is mental exhaustion. It’s when your brain don’t think so good. My brain can’t make the thoughts go! The thoughts ain’t movin’ proper! Make the brain thinking happen!
Anyway, mental exhaustion is quite common in different realms: school, work, creative endeavors, the socio-political state of the world, and the general experience of being alive. School, especially higher education, is such an incredible catalyst for mental exhaustion. I love learning things, but the amount of work and the deadlines inherent to higher education can be very, very draining. Absorbing so much information, and more advanced information, on a short timescale is tough on your brain. It’s like traffic. The more things that are going, the less able they are to go, if you catch my meaning. Sometimes traffic slows to a complete stop! There is no more going! Nothing can go. I’ve definitely experienced that in my brain cells. None of them are going. It happens when you’re trying to cram for an exam [why don’t you examine my exam-crammin’?], and your brain is processing a ton of information, but eventually it grinds to a halt. At that point, even if you keep on studying, more information cannot be held by your brain in any meaningful way. You gotta just go to sleep. Maybe you can study in the morning, maybe not, but it’s pointless to continue. Just accept how it goes.
Hey! School isn’t the only thing that gets you mentally exhausted. There’s also the undefeated champion exhaustion, WORK. You gotta read emails, you gotta write emails, you gotta think of all the words to use to fit into the bullshit corporate language. Just staring at a computer screen all day, your brain gets fried. It’s hard to get your brain to do stuff afterwards. I don’t want to even think about work right now, even though my current job isn’t that bad.
I’ll just talk about one more source of mental exhaustion before I, myself, get mentally exhausted. I also get mentally exhausted from creative endeavors. Been writing a lot, trying to write an effing book, and sometimes my brain is all tuckered out, and the words don’t form. It’s not quite the same experience as writer’s block, but the effect is similar: the words don’t go. Writer’s block is when you have a lot of motivation to write, you sit down, but the ideas are just shitty, or the sentences aren’t forming quite right, whereas mental exhaustion is when you can’t even attempt it.
OKAY, I now wanna mention the last form of exhaustion [in the opinion of this writer]. I experienced it a couple weeks ago, and it was fucking horrible. I call it the profound exhaustion. It was a complete weariness of every aspect of myself. My mind, my emotions, my body. It was an inability to act. Not ‘act’ like an actor in a movie. But like, the inability to do. It really made me feel how much we actually do to keep functioning. I know it sounds like depression, and it did have some similarities in some effects, but a couple differences too. A depressive episode, for me, feels like a complete lack of hope in my life. Not only that, but it’s the feeling that it’s impossible that there will be hope in the future. It’s very hopeless. It’s just brutal. But the profound exhaustion was more neutral. Like, it was not good, but it felt more like nothing [other than tiredness], whereas depression feels like the worst version of how bad you can feel.
Here’s what I did, when I was profoundly exhausted: I did eat some food and drink some water each day. As basic as you can get, but it was something. And I just watched/listened to this guy’s YouTube channel. His name’s JRose11, and he makes videos about Pokemon. Now I’m not even a huge Pokemon fan, but I did enjoy the first game, and he makes videos about the first game. He basically makes videos where he beats the whole game using just one Pokemon. It’s actually pretty interesting if you’ve played that game. He’s made dozens of videos on this, and some of them are an hour long. They’re all in a big playlist, so I just put them on, for 10 or 12 hours in a day. I couldn’t do anything else. I was just sitting and watching or lying down and watching, or just listening and staring at the ceiling. It was a few days of that. I was so worn out and numb and useless.
I call it a profound exhaustion because as I slowly got out of it, I started really thinking about what the fuck just happened. I have to be alive on purpose. Living is tiring. Life is about effort. I don’t mean that in a self-help, hustle culture, pro-capitalist way. You know those people, who think effort level explains everything in the world. They think that because they’re wrong and say stupid things. They’re saying [human] life is about [the twisted capitalist version of] effort.
But I don’t mean it like that. I mean that to be a living organism involves and requires doing at all times. You gotta eat, you gotta consume water, you gotta think, you gotta move around, you gotta preserve your ability to think and move around. Your body’s always processing things, making new cells, and those cells are always doing stuff all the time. There is no escape from effort other than a coma or death. I was just worn out from that fact. But hey, I’m back now! Putting in the effort of living! Typing things on a computer! Just what humanity is meant for!
Lefty Forrester 