Exhausted? History shows you're not alone
If the stresses of daily life have left you feeling exhausted, you're certainly not alone. Some would say that being ever-exhausted is the mark of modern life today.
And according to literary critic and medical historian Anna Katharina Schaffner that burnt-out feeling has always been with us.
Schaffner tracks exhaustion through the ages in her book, Exhaustion: A History, and tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti how her fascination with burnout bred new energy.
"Basically writing the book on exhaustion really, really helped me with overcoming my own exhaustion."
Exhaustion can present itself with various symptoms — mentally, physically and sometimes even culturally, or spiritually in nature.
"Exhaustion in my understanding entails the physical symptoms of lethargy weakness and fatigue but also emotional mental symptoms that include disillusionment hopelessness lack of engagement weariness," Schaffner tells Tremonti.
Exhaustion: A History begins with Pope Benedict XVI announcing his resignation due to exhaustion, Feb. 2013. Schaffner felt the symbolic moment illustrates a prevalent, broader, cultural concern with exhaustion, stress, and burnouts.
"He was spiritually exhausted. So it wasn't just kind of physical tiredness, fatigue, and weariness — it was something more profound," says Schaffner.
While it's impossible to measure objectively if we are more exhausted than our ancestors, Schaffner says in our age, it's more acceptable to talk about stress and fatigue.
"In the past, only a very selective elite would talk about their exhaustion caused by brain work. So it was probably something that scholars talked about or monks," says Schaffner
"Nowadays I think burnout and stress are a much more democratic and widespread phenomenon. Everybody suffers from it."
In ancient times, Schaffner tells Tremonti there was no scientifically-solid way to measure energy levels, and no clear conception of human energy available in Western medicine, but she says metaphors were abundant to explain the feeling of burnout.
She points to a medieval text in her book that describes exhaustion as "a tepid bowl of milk on which flies settled."
Schaffner says in her research, vampires were one of the many metaphors equated to exhaustion relating to "anxieties of something out there stealing our energies."
"The vampire is a figure that epitomizes the idea that there's an evil-outside-parasitical for sucking us dry."
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Kristin Nelson.