A new kind of exhausted.

read the German Version

Why People Burn Out Even When They’re Trying Their Best. And How Outdated Work Cultures Are Pushing an Exhausted Society Over the Edge.

It’s not the individual that’s “weak” — it’s human biology collapsing under constant societal, global, social and professional pressure.

We’re living in a time where the world burns faster than we can breathe. Crises no longer arrive in waves—they stack on top of each other. Daily life is smothered by global conflict, rising costs, political instability, constant digital noise and a performance expectation that reaches into every corner of life. We’re expected to be present, informed, resilient, efficient, flexible, empathetic, robust and, of course, in a good mood while we do it.

And yet a strangely convenient claim refuses to die: people today are less resilient. Gen Z can’t cope. Back then, people “just powered through”. That argument smells like the stale cigarette haze of old meeting rooms where exhaustion didn’t exist simply because no one had the language or the permission to name it.

Anyone still insisting that people have become more fragile is missing the real point. It’s not humans who changed. It’s the environment that exploded. We’re juggling roles, responsibility, information floods and expectations that didn’t exist a generation ago—while working inside systems that still behave as if we live in a smaller, slower, more predictable world.

This new exhaustion is born in the collision between an overheated present and work logics designed for another era. People try to function. Organisations expect them to. And in that tension, overwhelm becomes inevitable. Discipline can’t fix a problem that never started with the individual.

This article breaks down what fuels this new form of exhaustion, how companies amplify it and what needs to change—structurally and individually—so that work remains possible at all without burning people out.

Overstimulation as the New Normal:
Why Our Nervous System Is Overloading

A random Tuesday today delivers more input than earlier generations encountered in months. We haven’t become more sensitive; the world is simply operating at a constant volume no human can sustainably process. News, conflicts, prices, crises, alerts, notifications, comparison culture — everything hits at a speed humanity has never experienced before. Every empty minute gets filled, every pause erased. Silence only exists if we create it on purpose.

The body reacts exactly as biology designed it to. It goes into alarm. Breath, pulse, muscle tension rise. Attention narrows. Options disappear. The system flips into survival mode.

When this isn’t an exception but a daily state, something fundamental shifts. People sleep worse, think foggier, feel less stable, become more irritable or more easily exhausted. Over time, strain becomes illness, inside and out. Decisions turn impulsive or lethargic, social friction increases, patience and creativity crumble, conflict tolerance shrinks.

And here’s a point conveniently ignored in public debate: not everyone experiences this overload in the same way. Financial security cushions some; others fight every month to stay afloat. Parents and caregivers live in entirely different bandwidths than people without care duties. Anyone facing discrimination, instability or social devaluation carries an extra load that never shows up in performance reviews. Fatigue isn’t static; it’s a shifting mix of resources, pressure and privilege. And from the top, it’s remarkably easy to judge the performance of those below, isn’t it?

This is precisely where organisations develop a blind spot. Work, in a capitalist society, isn’t a small piece of life — it’s the centre, the metronome, the thing that decides how much time, money, energy, agency and security people have. When this system generates pressure, uncertainty or chronic overload, it amplifies exhaustion that has long been coming from outside.

The Workplace in Stress Mode:
How Organisations Fuel Exhaustion

Still, leaders and HR departments stare at rising sick leave numbers and keep asking the same question: “Why aren’t our people performing?” !!!!11!!!1!

Maybe because resilience isn’t a personality trait but the by-product of healthy conditions.
Maybe because resilience grows in systems that distinguish between tension and recovery.
Or maybe because no human is built to juggle global crises, financial pressure, family responsibilities and an overflowing to-do list all at once.

While people try to keep their lives together in this permanent state of emergency, political decisions keep turning up the pressure: more work hours, shrinking real social benefits, less support in care systems, more responsibility pushed back onto families. These changes don’t land abstractly. They hit the people already carrying the most — women, parents, caregivers. Exactly where the load is already at maximum.

A real leadership example from my career makes it painfully clear.
Vera, early thirties, has a four-year-old daughter, works part-time and cares for her mother, who has cancer. Her husband travels constantly, and there’s no family backup. While her mother is in hospice, her child gets sick every two weeks during winter — daycare closed, fever, infection, the usual parental chaos. And in the middle of this reality her performance is supposed to be evaluated “fairly”, preferably in comparison to a child-free colleague without care responsibilities.

Of course Vera gets less done.
Of course she’s not always available.
Of course her capacity fluctuates.

But she brings competence, context, experience — things you can’t replace. The comparison is wrong, and the system behind it is even worse. This is the kind of pressure that pushes people to their limits even when they’re giving everything.

This is where the absurdity of the “low resilience” or “poor performance” narrative becomes obvious. While people like Vera are doing far more than is reasonable, the public conversation still claims performance is falling because “nobody wants to work anymore”.

Anyone who labels exhaustion as laziness shifts responsibility onto individuals and hides the real causes: structures that no longer fit the demands of our time. And the data makes these myths fall apart instantly.

Myths About Laziness:
What the Data Actually Shows

The myth that people are “gaming the system” is surprisingly persistent. As if illness were a decision. As if exhaustion were a lifestyle. As if burnout could be willed away with meditation.

Reality tells another story.

Major health insurers have reported the same pattern for years: mental health diagnoses are rising sharply across industries and age groups. According to the AOK, psychological sick leave has risen by 47 percent since 2014. TK shows similar numbers. Mental health issues are now among the leading causes of long absences. People with these conditions aren’t out for two days with a cold — they’re out for weeks, sometimes months.

And the pub-table suspicion of widespread “sick note abuse” collapses under testing. The WIdO analysed telephone-based sick notes extensively and found no evidence of systematic misuse.

Yes, there are individuals who bend rules. There always are — in top management, middle management, logistics, sales and every corner of society. But individual cases don’t explain a 50 percent rise in psychological illness.

Anyone claiming mental illness can be faked reveals a deeply cynical view of humanity and very little understanding of medicine. You can’t convincingly simulate weeks or months of insomnia, panic attacks, cognitive collapse, depressive episodes or severe physiological stress.

In short: misuse is noise. Exhaustion is the system. And this system creates pressures no mindset trick can solve.

If we accept that people aren’t lazy, not more sensitive, not less capable, then one conclusion remains: it’s not individuals who are failing. It’s the structures overwhelming them.

The Real System Failures:
Unreliability and a Toxic Performance Logic

This is the corporate world that thinks it’s “modern” because it offers a company bike, two afterwork events a year and an onboarding buddy who’s already drowning by week three. Meanwhile, the actual workday runs completely unchecked: one meeting chases the next, calendars look like a Tetris endgame, roles are vague, responsibilities blur, priorities are reshuffled every half hour and no one can say with certainty who is responsible for what.

Leaders — especially in middle management — are backed into a corner. They’re overloaded, overwhelmed and still expected to perform “stability” like a stage role. This permanent powering-through is often sold as strength, when in reality it’s the slow collapse of a system pretending everything is fine.

It’s a work model that preaches high performance and produces chaos, then acts surprised when people eventually stop “functioning”.

System Failure 1:
The Obsession With Making Everything Measurable

When the chaos finally becomes impossible to ignore, companies reach for their favourite reflex of the modern workplace: they try to cure uncertainty with metrics. Suddenly everything must be operationalised, quantified, analysed to death. Every task, no matter how complex, gets squeezed into KPIs as if human work could be disciplined into obedience by spreadsheets.

The flaw in that logic is massive. Not all work is measurable. Not all tasks can be compared. Different types of work have different time horizons, cognitive demands and ways of creating impact. Yet under the banner of “performance”, everything gets pushed into the same grid – as if strategy, creativity or care work could ever produce the same tidy values as an assembly line.

Curiosity and exploration need space to do their magic.

People genuinely ask, “How many ads did you create this week?” That’s about as meaningful as asking how many world-changing ideas can be squeezed into a 30-minute slot.

Creative work operates on a different logic. It’s qualitative, not quantitative. One good idea shifts more than a hundred mediocre ones.

Strategy, meanwhile, needs open space. You can’t force sharp thinking into fixed rhythms. Innovation is, by definition, wasteful. You discard nine versions to find the one that actually holds.

But complexity gets ignored, quality gets penalised, depth becomes invisible.

And this is exactly where many organisations fail: in their desperate pursuit of metrics, they generate pressure and end up producing mediocrity.

System Failure 2:
Linear Systems vs. Circular Reality

Linear systems assume performance is predictable and uniform. They expect stability, constant availability and steady output rates. Humans don’t work like that. Humans have cycles. They have hormonal shifts, creative waves, emotional spikes, exhaustion, worries, poor sleep, responsibilities outside work and biological rhythms that don’t fit into an Excel sheet.

When a system expects a person to function identically every single Tuesday, it creates instability by design. Every deviation — illness, a child with a fever, a rough night, a creative low, a conflict, a world event before breakfast — becomes a “fault” in a linear system.

Linearity punishes reality. It pressures people to be consistent in ways they simply cannot be. This is how overload, guilt, secret overtime, burnout and quiet withdrawal develop.

The problem isn’t that humans are unreliable. The problem is that linear systems produce unreliability because they refuse to account for human fluctuation. If people are supposed to carry the system, then the system must be built in a way that can carry people.

Anything else produces wear and tear.

No air to breath? Might be systematic.

So?
What Do People Actually Need to Avoid Burning Out

What do people really need? Not toughness (hello, Mr. Merz). Not another round of mindset mantras. And definitely not more self-optimisation that drags them even deeper into the spiral of performance and exhaustion.

The most important resource companies need to protect today isn’t time — it’s the nervous system of their people.

How Organisations Must Change
If They Want to Survive the Future

Organisations that want to stay functional in the long run need to rethink their architecture. It’s no longer enough to play old models faster. The future belongs to systems that account for human reality and create conditions where real productivity can happen.

1. Circularity as a Structural Principle

Circularity isn’t a trend; it’s the foundation of stability. And it works on three levels: the individual, the team and the organisation.

On the individual level, circularity means people aren’t kept in permanent output mode. Load, relief, integration and learning phases are intentionally built in. Not symbolic breaks, but real recovery built into the system.

On the team level, circularity means responsibility, knowledge and processes don’t sit on single shoulders. Roles are wider, not narrower. Work can move without derailing projects. Teams become more resilient, collaborative and intelligent. A person dropping out no longer means standstill — it means redistribution. That’s how continuity is created without burning people out.

On the organisational level, circularity means projects move through cycles rather than being stacked endlessly. There are phases of deepening, integration, evaluation and adjustment. A company that takes outcomes seriously makes room for reflection instead of pushing it to the margins. It plans quarters with the honest understanding that humans are unreliable in seasonal, personal and biological ways.

Circularity makes systems resilient. It prevents the humanity of one person from paralysing the many. And it ensures that performance isn’t forced — but made possible.

2. Creating Space for Greatness

Innovation, impact and quality don’t emerge on a conveyor-belt rhythm. They require work models that see thinking, learning and creativity not as “time thieves” but as core drivers of modern value creation.

It starts with job profiles. Tasks whose output cannot be measured in tidy serial units — strategy, creativity, communication, research, development — need qualitative assessment, not artificially constructed KPIs. A brilliant idea can’t be counted in units. A good text won’t appear faster because there’s a stopwatch next to it. Organisational excellence happens where work isn’t chopped into quantitative micro-fragments.

Greatness needs space. Space for learning, exploring, breathing. It also needs leadership that creates clarity instead of disruption. Leadership that provides orientation rather than spiralling into haste. Leadership that guides not through control, but through stabilisation — and that kind of leadership must start at the very top or middle management will be the one that collapses.

If an organisation truly wants quality, it must create conditions where quality is possible. The ability to think, observe, connect ideas and make bold decisions doesn’t emerge in environments of permanent pacing. It emerges in environments that allow depth. That’s the foundation of innovation, differentiation and relevance.

Future capability grows where systems are flexible — and where people are allowed to grow big.

And What About Us as Individuals?
Self-Leadership Instead of Self-Optimisation

And what about us? Yes, we hold responsibility. For our work, our decisions and our own nervous system. But that responsibility doesn’t begin with optimising ourselves even further, becoming more efficient or pushing ourselves to the edge just to fit into a loud, fast system. Self-leadership is the opposite of that.

Self-leadership means noticing your own state in the first place. Many people only realise they’re overloaded when the body has already shut down. The real work begins much earlier — the moment you feel things tightening, when your mind fires sharper than necessary, or when focus and clarity begin to fade. Anyone who catches that early can intervene before something tips.

“You’re allowed to be annoyed and I’m allowed to stay calm.”

Self-leadership also means setting boundaries that keep you capable of acting.

A sentence like “I can take this on, but not today” isn’t an insult and it’s not laziness. It’s orientation for everyone involved. Boundaries keep people functional, teams stable and work predictable. They prevent someone from silently holding on too long and then suddenly disappearing completely.

Another part of self-leadership is staying with yourself when people around you lose their emotional footing. The line “You’re allowed to be irritated, and I’m allowed to stay calm” is a very practical tool of self-regulation — emotional stability isn’t indifference. It simply means you don’t adopt every mood that lands at your feet.

This is where coaching can play a powerful role. It creates a space where people learn to recognise their patterns, understand their reactions and reclaim their ability to act. Self-leadership is a skill, and coaching provides the structure to build it.

And yes, work matters. It pays our bills, shapes our identity and ties us to responsibility. But responsibility doesn’t mean enduring everything you’re handed. It means acting consciously without losing yourself in the process.

Self-leadership doesn’t replace good structures. But without it, no one can meaningfully contribute to building better ones. Future-ready organisations emerge where systems and individuals learn, regulate and carry responsibility together.

Conclusion:
The Future Emerges Where Work Becomes Human Again

Organisations that continue to rely on speed, constant availability and linear performance will lose their people first — and their future right after. Anyone who wants to survive needs structures that create stability, enable clear priorities and treat recovery as a necessity rather than a luxury. Leadership must be able to regulate. Teams need orientation. Individuals need self-leadership, not self-exhaustion.

Human-centred work culture isn’t a wellness add-on. It’s the prerequisite for quality, innovation and long-term performance. Companies that understand this gain stability and clarity. Above all, they keep the people who would otherwise burn out.

When work aligns again with human reality, the future becomes possible. Everything else is wear and tear.

Find out more Corporate Coaching and how it can help your organisation or check out personal coaching and start with yourself.