The Exhaustion Index 🔥 May 5, 2025 (Edition #12)
A weekly report on burnout, overwork, and the quiet rebellion against productivity culture.
Welcome to The Exhaustion Index 🔥
If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time—because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.
Think of this as BURNT’s news section—minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques. Let’s get into it.
This week, we’re talking about:
🧠 Jia Tolentino’s brain is exploding and yet still manages to write an excellent essay
🎧 Pete Buttigieg enters the most chaotic bro-podcast on the internet and walks away with a masterclass in message discipline
📊 6 in 10 Americans say the government should restrict false info online—yes, even at the cost of free speech
🚩 “Grit over grind”? Rest is the real flex
💬 On the power of speaking your truth—even if it costs you something
📸 Artist Iké Udé is finally getting the flowers he deserves, thanks to the 2025 Met Gala
Let’s get into it.
📆 Week of May 5 2025
1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week
📖 “My Brain Finally Broke” – Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker
This isn’t just a personal essay. It’s a cultural diagnosis.
In “My Brain Finally Broke,” Jia Tolentino puts words to a feeling many of us have been silently shouldering: that reality itself is becoming unreadable. That the internet, fascism, AI, war, and parenting—all at once—have melted our cognitive wiring and left us disoriented in ways we can’t fully explain.
She writes about misreading emails as geopolitical threats, the glitchy dissociation of doomscrolling, and the slow erosion of truth, attention, and even memory. It's not just her—it’s all of us, trying to orient ourselves in a world where real horrors and fake images blend until we no longer trust our instincts. The result is a kind of cognitive smog that no amount of "mindfulness" can cut through.
This piece is devastatingly honest, politically sharp, and a must-read if you’ve felt like your brain is running on fumes and your reality-processing software keeps crashing.
2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It (Against ALL odds)
🎧 Pete Buttigieg on Flagrant with Andrew Schulz
This one even surprised me. Pete Buttigieg—our soft-spoken, policy-wonk Transportation Secretary—walked into Flagrant, one of the loudest, bro-iest, least intellectually serious podcasts on the internet… and walked out unscathed, unbothered, and honestly, kind of iconic.
Let’s be real: the Flagrant guys are not exactly deep thinkers. They’re the kind of vaguely liberal podcast bros who confuse contrarianism for critical thinking. But Pete didn’t flinch. For nearly three hours, he held the line—on Trump’s tariffs, on billionaires, on LGBTQ+ rights, on Social Security, even on White Lotus. He didn’t pander, didn’t dumb anything down, and didn’t let lazy “devil’s advocate” nonsense slide. Am I a Pete stan? For the most part. But I’m also someone trying to consume a wider range of content—not because I think these guys are brilliant (they’re not), but because we can’t live in echo chambers and expect to hold power accountable. This appearance mattered. Whether or not you’re a fan, this was a smart, strategic move—and honestly, a necessary one. We need more of this kind of engagement. Go Pete!
3️⃣ Stat of the Week: Did You Know?
📊 65% of Americans think the government should restrict false information online—even if it limits freedom of information.
We’re not just burned out—we’re overwhelmed. From violent content to flat-out disinformation, the internet has become a firehose of emotional and intellectual chaos. And despite America’s obsession with “free speech,” most people are quietly (or not so quietly) saying: please, someone do something about this.
When truth becomes a casualty of content, it’s not surprising people want some guardrails. The question is: who gets to build them
?
4️⃣ Productivity Myth to Unlearn
🚩 “Grit over grind.”
Okay, but what if they are both are harmful?
“Grind culture” told us to hustle until we broke. “Grit culture” swooped in and rebranded that suffering as noble—like if you could just persevere harder, endure longer, and dig deeper, your burnout would transform into legacy. Spoiler: it won’t.
Let’s be honest—grit when passionate makes sense! But grit and grind for work?? They both still ask you to override your body, ignore your needs, and prove your worth through output.
Discipline has a place. But not it’s punishing. You don’t earn rest by surviving torment. You earn it because you’re human.
5️⃣ Quote of the Week: Something to Sit With
💬 “Anything you lose by speaking your truth isn’t a loss. It’s an alignment.”
Let this one land. We spend so much time trying to preserve things—relationships, reputations, roles—that no longer reflect who we are. But truth has a way of burning through the excess. And yes, it might cost you something. But if it does? That wasn’t yours to keep. That was misalignment posing as connection.
You don’t lose when you choose honesty. You realign. You remember yourself.
6️⃣ Something Beautiful Just Because
📸 Iké Udé, Finally Getting His Flowers
There are some artists who stay decades ahead of the moment—and Iké Udé is one of them. The Nigerian-American photographer, artist, and dandy-about-town has been crafting his visual universe for years: elegant, cinematic portraits that celebrate Black excellence and style with razor-sharp detail and reverence. But this month, with Vogue’s May 2025 cover and the opening of the Met’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibition, Udé’s name is finally becoming more mainstream. FINALLY.
His portraits of Colman Domingo are lush, theatrical, and deeply intentional—pulling from neoclassical art and dandyism to create something timeless. But what’s perhaps most moving is how Udé’s work, long dismissed as “too stylized” or “too referential,” is finally being recognized for what it has always been: canon-worthy.
This moment isn’t just overdue—it’s proof that beauty with depth, context, and craft always finds its way people!
