Why are you so tired all the time?

How much of our exhaustion can we really attribute to the eternal-growth economy? Well, it’s interesting to think that the earliest self-help books date to the onset of the industrial revolution. Ever since, we've been told to do more, be more, get busier. The truth is, you'll never check off everything on your to-do list. You were never meant to. Kashyap Kompella writes on how we got here, and the paths we can take instead

- Kashyap Kompella

We have companies today the size of early kingdoms. A king never met all his subjects, but a CEO's door must always be open.

Your phone likely pinged at least once while you read those lines. Meanwhile, there are about 400 unopened emails, on average, in every inbox.

There's a reason you feel tired or overwhelmed so much of the time.

There simply isn't enough time or opportunity to do all the things we have now been primed to "want" to do.

A nagging feeling of inadequacy then creeps in. There is the sense, at least occasionally, that one is not being the best version of oneself, in one's various roles (parent, partner, co-worker, caregiver).

How did we begin to hurtle this much? Some of it can be traced to messaging that goes as far back as the 1850s.

It is interesting to note that what is widely considered the world's first self-help book, Self-Help (a book on self-improvement and perseverance; translated into several languages, including many Indian ones) was released in 1859, as the industrial revolution sped up.

Ever since, there has been a push to "have it all" which has really been a push to "do it all". Pop psychology has underlined, over and over, the idea that one can be whatever one wants to be (as long as what one wants to be is busy).

Two things have grown dramatically, Tamid this drive to speed things up: the number of "busy" hours, and the number of people we know.

The average person knew a few dozen to about 200 people in the pre-industrial age.

Today, researchers estimate that each of us knows about 600 people by name.

From a world in which there was little to do after sundown, and only darkness to do it in a world in which the only establishments open all night were the local church or temple, and a disreputable pub-we live in a world of 24x7 everything.