We’re all tired, and it’s making us vulnerable. No, this is not a rambling of someone in their early 30s whose joints would flare up from crouching when she had walked 20,000 steps around the university during college. No, I’m talking about how the current society seems to be conspiring to keep us tired.

Picture this: you’ve just clocked out from work. Even though you’re just sitting around the entire day, you feel mentally drained. All energy was spent diagnosing and solving problems that should not have existed when the people you work with have the foresight to predict that it’s going to be a problem before continuing as if nothing bad will happen. You drive home, which consumes more of your remaining mental and physical energy, practicing defensive driving and calming yourself down for every dumb driver you encounter. At home, you may want to reheat some leftovers or maybe grab some takeout. You decided against going to the gym, because duh, you’re tired. You’re sure your “productive” habits cannot be bothered (even though you will be when you consume related content that will guilt you for letting yourself go). And then, you just scroll while eating. Or you watch an hour-long video essay on YouTube or binge-watch Netflix. You look up, it’s almost 11. Time for bed. Time to do it all over again.

You feel very, very tired. It’s the kind of tiredness that not even a weeklong vacation can hope to save.

It’s funny how the problems society has created offer us solutions that are far worse and more expensive (financially and resource-wise). Case in point, AI. We have become creatures who outsource our thinking to computers. We’ve grown reliant on automation, algorithms, and AIs because we cannot be bothered to think anymore. Simply because daily living is tiring. Being an adult is tiring. We have a lot of other things to do, like work, chores, and keeping up with social connections. So we default to what’s already there, to the mass accessible forms of entertainment, and what everyone else seemed to be doing.

Spoon-feeding psychological comfort and convenience to the already tired man had turned us into lobotomized slaves.

We cannot filter, not put defenses, when we’re tired.

However, are we just lazy? I don’t think we are lazy.

I argue that we will always be tired. Our bodies and minds are working machines; they will always metabolize. It will always be on the move. So what if we change the things that will tire us, something that will make us a lot less guilty of the time wasted when we finally look up from our screen or check our screen time.

Intentional inconvenience seemed to be gaining momentum nowadays. People are collecting and using physical media instead of streaming. People are going out more to explore and see people. Some of us were pushing our online activity into our daily routine. We’re still tired from work, but we chose to play our offline playlist while driving. We look forward to doing our hobbies after dinner, like assembling Gunpla or painting mini figs while listening to our CD collection or hanging out with family members for a DVD movie night.

Protect your energy. I don’t mean that in a New Age way, but in the psychological way. We can only take in so much before we get too overwhelmed, and then we shut down to prevent overheating. A lot of us don’t get to decide much on where our energy would be spent when we have work and school, sometimes even both at the same time. That’s why we have to fight for the remaining hours we have in the day. Make the actions you do more physical, like popping a CD out from its case rather than moving your thumb up and down on a black screen. Make it flipping through a book instead of passively listening to one. Write, or draw, even if it’s crap, because it’s a better waste of energy than being annoyed at yourself for losing more time on the internet. Visit your friends when they won’t meet you at the mall because they are tired from work.

Some things take time. AI wanted “creators” to create in no time. Art and other groundbreaking concepts take time to conceptualize, to formalize, to materialize. Who wanted fast things? Capitalism. Specifically, social media.

This speed is making us tired. Anything made fast, with shortcuts, has more weak points than it can be called substandard.

You will feel tired, so you might as well choose what will take up your time.

A tired man cannot think for himself. He will bestow mankind’s unique gift to AI because he can no longer do so.

8/11/2025