How To Resist Despair In The Age of Exhaustion

Why holding onto purpose is itself a form of resistance.

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

I feel exhausted.

I work a full-time job while going to graduate school full-time. I try to make time for friends, chores, taking care of my health, etc., but I constantly feel unproductive.

I always feel like there should be more to do and more to accomplish. I always have that feeling of not being good enough.

I am sure many of you can relate. How many jobs do you have to work to keep afloat? I can tell you that millions of people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

We didn’t even get into taking care of kids, our families, and ourselves, along with multiple other obligations. As life becomes more unaffordable, we are witnessing live-stream genocide/war crimes, and we are expected to be more and more productive…life becomes exhausting.

We in the working class are overworked and underpaid, we are exploited, and this exploitation alienates us from ourselves and each other. This alienation fragments us, pulling us away from each other and from the world around us.

Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs called the alienating process inherent in capitalist production “reification”.

On the one hand, the objectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process already accomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system.

History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukacs

Reification describes the process by which we see things as commodities or objects. Everything is reduced to what can be bought, sold, or measured, rather than to the human relationships behind things.

For example, at a job where quotas matter, you will be judged not by your character but by how much you produce and meet that quota.

Things become disconnected, you become disconnected from your job, and you become disconnected from everyone else. The capitalist economic system depends on this disconnection.

Capitalism is built on the fragmentation of labor; factory workers are meant to specialize, and so is everyone else. Work is broken into tasks, tasks are measured, and time is quantified. Human labor itself becomes a commodity: your time can be sold, your skills come at a price, and your work is measured.

You become just another number, another cog in the machine, and this has vast psychological impacts.

I think this is part of why we feel so isolated and so pacified. Even our attention and understanding are a market, the commodification of human beings relies on the fragmentation or reification of society itself.

The reification of society treats people as things. You start treating yourself that way too; instead of meaning and purpose, you focus on production.

Am I productive enough?

Am I optimizing my time well enough?

This process is physically and psychologically draining as well, because you never allow yourself to rest (along with the fact that you cannot rest in many cases).

Reification also ties into an existential exhaustion as you lose meaning. Most of our waking hours are spent at work or school (which many treat as work). During those hours, you only see your tasks, your role, and your metrics, not the full meaning of what you do.

This exhaustion can quickly turn into despair as effort never leads to fulfillment, meaning disappears, and you internalize the system's problems.

What is the potential antidote to this?

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An Antidote to Reification

Imagine a pair of socks. You go to the store and buy a pair of socks.

Have you ever considered the interconnected process that brought those pair of socks from raw material to the store you walked into? Someone had to grow the cotton that makes up your socks, someone had to process that cotton, someone had to transport the cotton, someone else had to sew the socks together, someone had to pick up those socks, process them into packages, someone had to ship the socks to a port, someone had to drive a large boat with those socks across the sea, someone had to pick up the socks from the port, etc…

There is an entire system and process involved in creating, distributing, and selling those socks. Most of us do not think of that vast system. This is where Lukacs has another important concept.

Another concept from Lukacs is “totality” which means seeing the whole system. We need to see society as a connected whole, not just isolated pieces.

For example, rising grocery prices are tied to inflation, global supply chains, corporate decisions, government policy, etc.

The socks mentioned earlier are part of a global system that involves numerous people to make it function.

Totality is a way of breaking out of the conditions that make reification feel inevitable. Here are 5 ways totality does this:

1. You can see that the feelings of exhaustion and despair are not just yours.

You tell yourself that you are bad at managing your time and that you need to improve, but, in totality, that means shifting that self-blame toward deeper systems.

Ask yourself, what system am I inside? Rather than, what is wrong with me?

Totality allows you to see the constant demands on productivity, the economic pressures, social expectations, the algorithms that run our lives, and more.

It allows you to see that these feelings are not just yours but are felt by many others in a system meant to exhaust you.

2. It can restore meaning.

While reification can isolate you into tasks, metrics, and outputs… understanding totality seeks to connect us to other people, social processes, and real-world impacts.

Human beings need meaning; we need to know that what we do has meaning. While this meaning is almost impossible to find in an alienating capitalist system, we can find meaning in our relationships, our communities, and across arbitrary borders.

Meaning can help us connect with others based on our humanity rather than seeing people and things as separate from one another.

3. It breaks the illusion that everything is unchangeable.

Reification makes the world feel rigid, mechanical, and inevitable. This brings to mind the Mark Fisher concept of capitalist realism, in which people believe there is no alternative to capitalism.

But capitalism, much like the rest of our social order, is historically created, can change, and social relations themselves are not permanent. We can change our system for the better and totality helps us have the ability to see the possibilities.

4. It de-objectifies you.

Rather than seeing yourself as an object and as a unit of productivity. Totality allows us to see ourselves as part of a collective, an active participate of society, and someone capable of shaping structures.

Rehumanization is part of what the left is all about. Change starts when we believe and see that we are capable of bringing that change.

Capitalist society depends on us seeing ourselves as objects that can be used in the marketplace. In order for a new world to form, this sense of self must be broken, and something better must be reclaimed.

5. It opens the possibility of changing the system.

Without totality, we see solutions as fragmented self-optimization hacks that fit perfectly within the system. We think about time management over asking bigger questions.

For change to occur, we as a collective must ask the bigger questions.

Questions such as:

Why is work organized the way it is?

Why does everything need to be measured?

Who benefits from the way this structure is set up?

When we ask these bigger questions, we can begin to challenge and hopefully change the system by which we live.

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Reclaiming Ourselves in an Exhausting World

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us with a clearer understanding that our exhaustion is not a personal failure; it is a structural outcome. The system demands more from us than we can sustainably give, then convinces us that falling short is our fault. Reification isolates us into fragments: worker, student, consumer, metric. It strips meaning from what we do and replaces it with output, efficiency, and endless comparison.

But totality gives us a way to fight back not by escaping the system overnight, but by seeing it clearly.

When we understand that our exhaustion is shared, we stop blaming ourselves. When we see the interconnected processes behind our lives, we begin to restore meaning. When we recognize that the system is historically created, we understand that it can be changed. And when we reject the idea that we are merely objects to be optimized, we begin the process of rehumanizing ourselves.

This is where resistance begins.

Not in perfection. Not in productivity. But in clarity.

There are a few takeaways we can hold onto:

• Your exhaustion is not a personal defect; it is a political condition.

• You are not a machine, and your worth is not measured by output.

• You are part of a broader system and a broader collective.

• The way things are is not the way they have to be.

And maybe most importantly:

• Rest, reflection, and connection are not escapes from the struggle; they are part of it.

Because a system that thrives on fragmentation depends on us staying isolated, exhausted, and disconnected. Every moment we reconnect with ourselves, with others, with the reality of the system we live in, is a small act of defiance.

You are not alone in feeling this way.

And more importantly, you are not powerless within it.

The first step is seeing clearly.

The next step is deciding what to do with that clarity.