The Weekly Exhaustion Index 🔥 July 14, 2025 (Edition #20)
A weekly report on burnout, overwork, and the quiet rebellion against productivity culture.
Welcome to The Weekly 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.
This week, we’re talking about:
📖 "Kids who can't read good"
🎧 Free therapy by Dr. Orna Guralnik and Jay Shetty
📊 Influencer Burnout Is Real
🚩 Taking a vacation actually IMPROVES your well being!
💬 Rewrite Your Story
🎨 What Was the Happiest Moment of Your life, So Far?
Let’s get into it.
📆 Week of July 14, 2025
1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week
📖 Kids Can’t Read. But It’s More Complicated Than That
The viral panic about Gen Z and Alpha’s declining reading skills is real, but maybe not for the reasons we think. According to Vox, elementary reading scores have been dropping since 2013 (long before the pandemic), with 40% of fourth-graders now reading below basic proficiency. But the problem isn’t new. American literacy rates have always been shaky, especially for struggling students. What’s changed is the gap: high-achieving kids are fine, but the bottom third is falling faster.
Experts blame everything from too much screen time to bad curricula to overreliance on phonics drills. But I’m going to ask controversial question: What counts as literacy in 2025? Is it Dickens, or decoding the chaos of Twitch chat? Either way, our current tools aren't meeting students where they are. And it’s showing.
2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It
🎧 On Purpose with Jay Shetty ft. Dr. Orna Guralnik
Orna and Jay, my dream duo. If you’ve ever watched Couples Therapy (formerly on Showtime, now on Amazon), you already know Dr. Orna Guralnik doesn’t play. She’s sharp, clinical, wildly compassionate, and always cutting to the core.
In this episode, she and Jay unpack what really breaks relationships. They discuss the invisible inheritance we bring into our partnerships, and even get into around parent/child dynamics.
Orna also challenges the myth that individualism is selfish. In fact, she argues that intimacy requires self-definition, and that most of us are scared to speak what we feel because we don’t trust we’ll be met there. This episode is about honesty, courage, and the hard (but freeing) truth that relationship problems are rarely just about the relationship.
If you’re partnered, single, dating, divorced, or just trying to learn more about yourself and relationships, LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE.
3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?
📲 There’s now a mental health platform specifically for digital creators.
CreatorCare by Revive Health offers sliding-scale therapy for influencers, freelancers, and artists navigating the psychological weight of being Extremely Online. Because being a creator isn’t just a lifestyle, a job, and often, a blurred boundary between self and work. The constant pressure to produce. The algorithmic anxiety. The isolation. The cyberbullying. The inconsistent income. The burnout…it actually adds up. I personally think this is a genius move. If your job is to be public, visible, and emotionally available 24/7…you definitely have a lot of content to work through.
🔗 Learn more or share with someone who needs this
4️⃣ Productivity Myth to Unlearn
🚩 Myth: “I’ll be seen as lazy or not committed if I take time off.”
🧠 FALSE: Not taking vacation signals poor boundary-setting, not hustle.
The U.S. is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid vacation, yet even when it’s offered, 55% of workers leave unused days on the table. Ironically, white-collar knowledge workers are the most likely to do this. Why? We believe we can’t, and/or our value is tied to working.
I am here to say..that’s BS. Burnout isn’t a badge of honor. Enmeshment is lame and rest is actually part of high performance.
Believe it or not, taking a vacation actually IMPROVES your well being!?! Don’t believe me?? Well click the link below.
5️⃣ Quote of the Week: Something to Sit With
💬 This Joan Didion Quote Masterpiece
Rewrite those stories, over and over again.
For you. Your Heart…For your one precious life.
6️⃣ Just Because: Something Beautiful, Just Because
📺 “What was the happiest moment of your life, so far?”
For its Happiness Issue, The New York Times Magazine asked a simple, beautiful question: “What was the happiest moment of your life, so far?”
More than 70 people responded. Not experts. Not influencers. Just regular people. Offering up their memories, in a way that we can expect weddings, birth, travel, and the unexpected, beautiful, mundane moments. They’re so honest they’ll undo you. All of them are proof that joy doesn’t need to be loud to be real.
It reminded me how much wisdom lives in people we’ve never met. And how happiness, when it shows up, is usually unscripted. Fleeting. Unpolished. Not a performance. Just presence. So simple.
