The Quiet Exhaustion At Work
7:14 AM. I’m standing at the subway entrance on Tuesday, holding a cold oat latte I bought out of habit, watching my breath fog up the air. Not because it’s freezing — it’s not, not really. I’m just tired in a way I can’t name. The third bus comes and I don’t get on. I just stand there.
That’s how I knew something was off.
I wasn’t always like this. Three years ago I was the girl who stayed late “for the culture,” who posted slack stickers with #blessed at midnight on a Wednesday. I actually believed the hype. I thought being busy meant being important. I thought tired was just a sign I’d earned my place at the table.
Then somewhere between the third layoff rumor and the seventh “quick sync” that ran ninety minutes, I stopped sleeping through the night. My chest started doing this thing around 3 PM every day — tight, like someone’s sitting on it, just for a second, then gone. I told my doctor. She said it was anxiety. I laughed. I didn’t feel anxious. I felt nothing.
That’s the thing about quiet exhaustion work does to you. It’s not the crying-in-bathroom kind. It’s not even the yelling-at-your-manager kind. It’s worse. It’s the kind where you look totally fine. You answer slack messages in four seconds flat. You smile at standups. You say “totally fine, thanks for asking” when your coworker pings you at 4:47 PM on a Friday about a “tiny thing.” You laugh at the right beats. You volunteer for the new initiative. You post a team dinner photo with a heart emoji.
And inside, you’re just gone.
I remember one specific moment. March, maybe April. I’d been at the office for eleven hours. I was packing my bag to leave and my coworker Maya walked by and said, “you okay? you look a little pale.” I said, “yeah! just tired.” And I meant it. I wasn’t lying. I was tired. But the tiredness had this texture now, like wet sand filling up my ribcage. I could feel it in my teeth. I could feel it in my fingers. But I still drove home, made pasta, watched a show, scrolled, slept, did it again. I told nobody.
That’s the quiet part, by the way. The exhaustion itself isn’t even that loud. Nobody is screaming at you. Nobody is throwing things. Your manager is “supportive.” Your benefits include therapy, technically, but the waitlist is six weeks. Your team is “tight-knit.” Your office has a ping-pong table. Everything looks, on paper, fine.
You just stop wanting to wake up. That’s it. That’s the whole symptom. You don’t even hate your job. You just don’t want to do another Tuesday.
Why is it so quiet, though? Why don’t we say it out loud?
I think it’s because the script doesn’t have space for it. If you say “I’m burned out,” people hear “I’m weak.” If you say “I’m exhausted,” people hear “you’re not resilient enough.” If you say “I can’t do this anymore,” people hear “you’re a quitter.” So you don’t say it. You just keep going. You go to the gym. You drink your celery juice. You book the therapy appointment for a Sunday afternoon six weeks out, and you tell yourself you’ll cancel if something comes up at work, and something always comes up at work.
Last Wednesday at 2:13 AM, I was standing outside a 7-Eleven in Chaoyang District with a coworker named Daniel, both of us in the same meeting that ended three hours earlier. We were buying cigarettes he didn’t even smoke. He looked at me and said, “do you ever feel like we’re both just pretending?” I said “yeah, every day.” We stood there for a minute, said nothing, then went home. I cried in the elevator. I don’t know why. There was nothing to cry about, really. That was the worst part.
The thing I want to say out loud, that I haven’t said to anyone in my life, is that I don’t think I have a “reason” to be tired. I make decent money. I work from home two days a week. My boss is mostly chill. I’m not a single mom. I’m not dealing with a sick parent. I’m not in a war zone. So how can I be tired? Who am I to be tired? I should be grateful. I have a laptop and a chair and snacks in the kitchen.
I feel guilty for being tired. That’s the really messed up part.
I scroll LinkedIn and see posts like “I cried at work today and it was the best thing that ever happened to me 🚀” and I want to throw my phone into the ocean. I read articles titled “Why burnout is a gift” and I want to scream. I see coworkers post hiking photos with captions like “recharging after a busy week 💆♀️” and I want to ask them, do you actually recharge? Or do you just go back to being tired in a different zip code?
My friend Lin, who works at a totally different company, told me last month that she takes a Tuesday off every other week, just to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling. She calls it “doom days.” I asked her if it helps. She said, “I don’t know. But I get to not open slack for six hours and that’s something.” I get it. I really get it.
I tried to take a vacation in May. Four days. I went to Qingdao. I brought my laptop “just in case.” I opened it twice. Once to answer a “really quick” question that turned into ninety minutes. Once because I felt guilty for not opening it. My Fitbit logged my heart rate at 96 BPM while I was eating seafood noodles on a beach. I was on vacation. I was sunburnt and full of clams. I was supposed to be happy.
I came back and cried in the Uber from the airport. The driver asked if I was okay. I said “yeah, just tired.” He nodded like he knew. Maybe he did.
I think the reason work exhaustion hits so hard, the quiet kind, is that it has nowhere to land. You can’t point to a thing. You can’t say “my boss is the problem” because she’s fine. You can’t say “my team is toxic” because they’re nice. You can’t say “the workload is too much” because, technically, you can do it. You can do all of it. You can do it while smiling. You can do it while posting team photos. You can do it while crying in an Uber. You can do it. That’s the thing. You can do it.
So you keep doing it. You keep showing up. You keep saying “sounds good!” in slack. You keep eating lunch at your desk. You keep taking the 7 AM meeting even though you haven’t opened your eyes yet. You keep doing the breathing exercises the company app suggests at 2:47 PM. You keep making the oat latte. You keep standing at the subway entrance at 7:14 AM, watching the bus not come, feeling the wet sand in your chest, and you keep telling yourself it’s fine, it’s just a phase, it’ll pass, you just need a good night’s sleep, you just need to drink more water, you just need to do the yoga app your sister sent you.
I haven’t done the yoga app.
I want to be clear: I’m not writing this because I figured something out. I’m not writing this to inspire anyone. I’m writing this because I don’t know what else to do with it. I can’t say it out loud to my mom because she’ll say “just quit, come home.” I can’t say it to my partner because he’ll say “we can make it work financially.” I can’t say it to my coworkers because they’re all tired too and we’re all pretending together. I can’t say it to my manager because she’ll put me on a “wellness plan” that involves more meetings.
So I’m saying it here. To nobody. To the weird void of the internet.
I’m tired.
Not in a poetic way. Not in a “growth mindset” way. Just tired. The kind where my body feels heavy when I try to get out of bed. The kind where I forget to eat until 4 PM and don’t notice. The kind where I look at my dog and feel bad that I’m too tired to take her on a walk. The kind where I read three pages of a book and need to lie down. The kind where I cancel plans I was looking forward to, four times in a row, and stop telling people I’m coming.
The kind where you don’t really know what you’d do if you won the lottery, because the tiredness is so deep it has eaten your imagination too.
I think a lot of us are like this. I think a lot of us are sitting in nice offices with snacks and ping-pong tables and “unlimited PTO” we never use, and we are quietly, quietly disappearing. We are smiling in meetings. We are getting promoted. We are being told we are doing great. And we are losing something we can’t name.
I don’t have a list of five things you can do. I don’t have a tip. I have a sandwich I forgot to eat. I have a calendar that’s all gray blocks. I have a doctor appointment I keep rescheduling because the slot is during a meeting I “have to” be in.
I have a dog who deserves better walks.
I have a sister who texts me “u good?” and I always say “yep!” and that’s the whole conversation.
I have a body that keeps sending me signals I’m ignoring. The chest thing. The stomach thing. The waking up at 4 AM thing. The forgetting words thing. The staring at the wall for ten minutes thing. I keep telling myself it’s fine. I keep telling myself everyone is like this. I keep telling myself next quarter will be different, next role will be different, next company will be different.
But it won’t. Because I’m the constant. I’m the one who keeps saying yes. I’m the one who keeps “powering through.” I’m the one who keeps telling the tired to sit down and shut up so I can hit my OKRs.
I think I’m going to log off a little early today. I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll probably get pulled into something. I always do. But I wanted to write this down first. I wanted to put a pin in it. I wanted to say: I am a person who is tired. I am not a productivity hack. I am not a case study. I am not a “before” in a “glow up” story. I am just tired, right now, today, in this body, at this desk, in this economy, in this life.
If you read this and you felt something, I’m sorry. I mean that. I’m sorry we’re all just out here doing this.
I don’t have anything else to add. I have to go answer a slack message.
Tags: [“Workplace Wellbeing”, “Mental Health”, “Burnout Recovery”, “Gen Z Office Life”, “Quiet Quitting Era”]