Human doings
The silent exhaustion of the constant hustle
In June 2026, I was dismissed from my job at the end of my 6-month probation.
I didn’t see it coming.
It happened in what felt like the blink of an eye, in a windowless room with barely enough space for the 3 people in the meeting.
It was an experience that I’m sure could’ve been handled better, from the suggestions that I didn’t care to the questioning of whether I thought the information presented was good enough, to the lack of eye contact or tone from the person leading the meeting.
It was abrupt, it was cold, it was every stage of grief knitted into one sentence: “We will be terminating your contract”
The initial shock in the moment is immeasurable: your mind starts racing with thoughts, but your words can’t form them into sentences; you immediately panic over how you are going to pay your bills.
You feel worthless, angry, indescribably sad and spend the next hour crying on the cold concrete floor by the bins out back, unsure if you are going to throw up or if your stomach is just in knots.
It was a dehumanising experience to live through.
Overall though, it wasn’t the losing of the job that has really affected me over the last couple of unemployed months; it was the loss of a team I had grown close to, the loss of being a part of a space where I could really be myself. The loss of conversations with people who became very meaningful to me, the loss of a community I had built.
The loss of a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, a place to be.
Even when you know that no longer being there is the right thing for your health, you saw how burnt out you had become in that space; it doesn’t take away the stabbing feeling of losing something.
A job, any job, is a culmination of your time, effort and energy. You spend more time at work collectively than you do anywhere else in your life, so to have it all of a sudden just gone is incredibly disorienting.
In the last 2 months being unemployed, I’ve realised that our value as people is placed on our productivity, our contributions, our hustle, our earnings.
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When we meet people for the first time, we greet them with the same scripted questions:
- What is your name?
- Where are you from?
- What do you do for work?
As if this small list tells us everything we need to know about our fellow human beings. As if the human experience can be whittled down to just a job.
We have become a society of human doings, rather than beings; we have internalised the narrative that we are not important to the world if we are not working. The workplace has moved from an external place to one whose language resides within our own minds.
My first instinct in finding myself unemployed wasn’t to take some time to rest and recover from the years of burnout and ongoing chronic depression; it was to dive into something else.
“How can I make money from home?” “Side hustles for people with ADHD” are just a couple of examples of my search history from these past few months.
The narrative that every moment of our lives, and everything we do, should have an income attached to it has ingrained itself so deeply in us that when we try to do nothing, guilt arrives.
If you write poetry, publish a book. If you’re a painter, sell your art. If you attend pottery classes, start a shop. If you watch a movie, make it one that teaches you something; if you listen to music, listen while doing something else.
Don’t be passive; always be doing something, always be on.
Even sleep has societally shifted from being seen as a vital human need to recovery so we can be productive the next day.
We have eliminated the beauty of hobbies, of the learning time, the imperfect work. Now, if something isn’t good enough to be listed on Etsy, it isn’t worth doing. If you aren’t building an audience or income, why are you doing it?
Our homes are supposed to be our sanctuaries, where we can rest, relax, do things that fill us with joy.
As children, we were curious about the world; we coloured messily outside of the lines, painted more on ourselves than our canvas, and couldn’t wait to show our creation to our guardians.
As adults, we have lost this exploration, this curiosity, this want to do things just for the feeling of doing them. We have been trained to believe that if what we fill our time with isn’t going to lead to an income, it’s not worth the time.
This shift is the ultimate victory for modern capitalism; we don’t need to be at our desk to be a part of the system anymore.
We carry our desk in our pockets; work emails are easily accessed next to personal ones; we wear it on our wrists, counting our steps and tracking our sleep. We have allowed biological survival to be turned into performance metrics.
“I did 11,500 steps yesterday”, we share on our Instagram story, waiting to be praised and hoping someone who did less than that feels a little bit bad for it.
We are exhausted, not because we are working hard, but because we are never permitted to stop being a product. We are never “off the clock.”
