Lately I've been noticing a particular kind of exhaustion. I see it in my team at B:Side, in the students I teach, in the business owners we talk with every week, and, if I'm honest, in myself. People have less patience than they did a year ago. They have more trouble concentrating, and a harder time finding satisfaction in work that still matters. Anxiety and frustration are familiar enough. What makes this different is the boredom sitting right beside them.
There is plenty to worry about and plenty to do. Somehow both can be true while the day feels suspended.
The closest comparison I can find is the stretch of a horror film when the music changes but the room stays the same. An ordinary doorway becomes hard to look away from. Every small sound might matter. The scene asks you to stay alert while giving you almost nothing to act on.
That is roughly how the news has felt for a while now. Economic signals point in different directions. Wars continue without resolution. AI keeps raising questions about work, competence, and the value of what we’ve spent years learning. And through all of it, the ordinary responsibilities carry on: the loan that needs a decision, the class that needs a lecture, the employee who needs an answer.
I suspect much of the fatigue comes from trying to live at both scales at once, absorbing uncertainty about the shape of the world while making decisions inside a normal workday. The future occupies attention the present still requires. After enough time, being prepared for what might happen becomes a standing demand with no recognizable point of completion. We start living on standby.
The Pressures Are Real, and So Is the Interval
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Plenty of this exhaustion has nothing to do with headlines. A business owner worried about cash flow may simply have an accurate read on the bank balance. A family struggling with housing costs needs more room in its budget. An employee carrying an unreasonable workload needs something taken off the list. Those problems deserve practical responses, and blaming the news cycle for them would be a convenient way to avoid responsibility.
Fair enough. But anticipation adds a demand of its own. Even when the immediate work is manageable, a portion of attention stays elsewhere, checking whether the conditions that make the work meaningful are about to change. A rising stock market can’t tell a household whether it can afford a move. A reassuring forecast can’t settle an employer’s next hiring decision. The person reading the good news still has to answer a question the good news doesn’t resolve. Then another update arrives.
There’s evidence that the interval itself has a cost. In a 2016 experiment, researchers asked participants to learn which visual cues predicted a mild electric shock. Stress, both reported and physiological, tracked uncertainty about the threat more closely than the threat itself. A 50 percent chance of a shock was more stressful than a certain one. A bad outcome doesn’t have to occur before anticipating it takes something out of you.
During that interval, checking feels like responsible behavior. You read the analysis, compare the forecasts, and try to tell a consequential development from another dramatic headline. Sometimes this changes a decision, but more often it leaves you with a more detailed account of a situation you still can’t influence. That second kind of checking is hard to stop, because the uncertainty remains. There is always one more thing to read before you feel fully oriented, and feeling oriented lasts only until the next update reopens the question.
Stimulated and Bored at the Same Time
We tend to associate boredom with an empty afternoon. But boredom also describes the frustration of wanting to engage with something and being unable to do it well. Psychologists Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson tie boredom to problems of attention and meaning. Too little cognitive demand interferes with engagement, and so does too much; so does activity that feels disconnected from anything we value. Stimulation and boredom can coexist.
Anyone who has spent an hour scrolling knows the feeling. You encounter something new every few seconds and finish the hour with almost nothing registered. Nothing had enough time, context, or consequence to become part of a sustained activity, and the next item offered another chance to find what the last one failed to provide. Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht found something close to this in the lab: people who could skip between videos got more bored than people who watched straight through. The attempt to escape boredom made it worse.
My concern is what happens when the material passing through this pattern concerns our future. We keep looking because the subject matters. We can’t settle into it because our attention keeps getting redirected. The work in front of us starts competing with an unfinished question large enough to make almost any single task feel small.
The Definition of Enough Keeps Moving
AI adds a personal version of that question. Learning a skill has always been a wager on its future usefulness. When the range of tasks a machine can perform changes every quarter, deciding where to invest effort gets harder, and the uncertainty reaches past employment into the story people tell about who they’re becoming. I see this most clearly in the students I teach.
The tools are also changing the work already on the desk. Researchers at UC Berkeley Haas spent eight months inside one technology company and found that AI use tended to expand the scope of people’s work, carry tasks into former breaks, and encourage several workflows at once. Employees felt engaged by individual tasks and more stretched across the day. Other research, including Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond’s study of customer support, finds real productivity and retention gains. Both can be true, because the effects depend on the work and on how the technology arrives.
For a leader, the practical question is what happens to the capacity the technology creates. Does some of it become time to learn, exercise judgment, or recover? Or does every gain immediately become a higher expectation? A person can become more capable and less able to finish the day if the definition of enough keeps moving.
The same problem shows up at a larger scale when we wait for events to tell us what kind of period we’re living through. There is a familiar temptation to postpone commitment until the next thing becomes clear. After the election. After the market settles. After the war ends. After we understand what AI will do. Each condition sounds reasonable on its own. Together they make an ordinary life feel provisional.
This is one reason the phrase “nothing ever happens” deserves attention. Taken literally, it’s indefensible. For people living through violence, displacement, unemployment, or the loss of a business, consequential events are happening right now, and their suffering doesn’t shrink because someone watching from a distance has grown tired of the story. But the phrase reveals something about the spectator’s expectations. We expect an event large enough to settle the argument, establish the new conditions, and tell us how to proceed. What arrives instead is another development that requires interpretation. The situation changes without becoming clear.
Eventually a definitive answer starts to look attractive simply because it would end the reconsideration. That is a dangerous point for judgment. A leader who promises certainty can offer emotional relief long before offering a credible account of reality.
The Warning Needs an End of Shift
I write often about leadership in a crisis era, and I’ll be the first to admit that carries a responsibility I haven’t always met. A crisis framework is useful when it helps us examine institutional trust, continuity, authority, and the capacity to act under pressure. It becomes less useful when every development confirms it and every delay becomes evidence that a larger rupture must be approaching. Those of us who ask people to take structural risks seriously owe them some account of how to live while those risks stay unresolved. Constant vigilance consumes the people expected to exercise it. Preparation needs a point at which someone can say the necessary work has been done for today. Otherwise the warning becomes one more indefinite obligation.
Sailors figured this out a long time ago. A ship at sea never resolves its uncertainty. The weather doesn’t settle, the horizon doesn’t clear, and the threat doesn’t announce a schedule. What the ship has instead is a watch bill. Someone is responsible for the next four hours, with the authority to act and a clear rule for when to wake the captain, and because that’s true, everyone else is allowed to sleep. The uncertainty hasn’t gone anywhere. It has been given a shape.
Most organizations don’t run that way. In an earlier essay, “No Whiplash,” I described the danger of giving people “stakes without levers.” A leader passes along a concern. The team inherits the anxiety, then returns to the same workload with the same authority and one more possible future to consider. The concern may be legitimate, and the communication still leaves people less able to work.
Uncertainty Needs a Shape
This is where leadership has consequences close enough to touch. Say a bank we work with gets a credible warning on a Friday afternoon that a payments provider may have been compromised. The scope is unclear, and customers depend on access before Monday payroll. Suspending service carries costs; continuing without adequate information carries different ones. Waiting for complete certainty would consume the time needed to respond.
The leader has decisions to make before the investigation is finished. Someone needs the authority to interrupt service, and someone has to establish what evidence warrants using it. Customers need accurate communication on a promised schedule. The people investigating need coverage so they can hand off and rest. Those arrangements give the uncertainty a practical form, and they let everyone outside the response team keep working. The threat is still serious, but the whole institution doesn’t have to spend the weekend refreshing the same screen.
Most periods of uncertainty lack a deadline that visible, which makes the discipline easier to neglect. A vague concern can circulate for weeks without anyone deciding what it requires. People keep monitoring it because nobody has said who owns it, what would warrant action, or when the rest of the team can turn its attention elsewhere. The remedy is ordinary management with a human consequence attached.
Name the owner. Every open concern needs one person responsible for the next decision, and everyone else needs to know who that is. If the decision belongs somewhere above the employee, say so, and tell them what they can reasonably expect from that owner.
Set the review date and keep it. A decision that stays in force until specified evidence changes it, reviewed on a stated schedule, gives people permission to stop reconsidering the same question all day. That permission has to be credible. A leader who sets a weekly review and then sends anxious messages every evening has taught the team which schedule actually matters.
Send authority with the assignment. Telling someone to take ownership while withholding information, resources, or permission makes the burden worse. Responsibility should arrive with enough room to exercise judgment.
Decide what stops. An organization can’t keep adding preparation to people already at capacity and assume a stronger sense of purpose will cover the difference. Someone has to decide what will stop, what can wait, and who covers what remains. Recovery is part of readiness once you expect people to make consequential decisions for longer than a single emergency shift.
The Ordinary Days Are the Institution
This can look disappointingly ordinary. Clear authority. A manageable set of priorities. A communication promise kept. A person able to go home because someone else has taken the next watch. I’ve written before about why excellence is boring, and this is that argument in a different key. Dependable organizations do a great deal of repetitive work that attracts no attention. They train people, maintain systems, review decisions, and fix small failures before those failures demand a public response.
That repetition has something endless anticipation lacks: a relationship between effort and consequence. A person can see what their work protects. They can finish a task and know why it mattered. The larger uncertainty continues, but the immediate obligation has been met. That is a modest form of confidence, and it deserves more respect than it gets. People learn whether an institution can be trusted through these recurring experiences. An answer arrives when promised, a hard fact is acknowledged, and a decision stays settled long enough for someone to carry it out. Over time, those experiences give people reasons to commit themselves to the work.
I worry that living on standby erodes that commitment before any dramatic failure occurs. When the future feels permanently unsettled, it becomes easier to treat the present as temporary. Relationships get less investment, decisions drift, and maintenance waits. The institution loses some of the capacity it will need if conditions get harder. A crisis era still consists of ordinary days, and its institutions endure or weaken through what people do on those days, including the days when everyone is tired of waiting for something decisive to happen.
The horror film will eventually resolve its suspense. Our obligations rarely give us that accommodation. They come due while the information is incomplete and the larger questions stay open. Someone still needs an answer from us. A colleague needs enough clarity to make a decision. A person who has been carrying responsibility needs someone else to take a turn. The future will keep its own schedule. The next promise is already on ours.
P.S. Leading through a crisis era is the subject of my book Honor Under Pressure, and its companion site, thefourthturningleader.com, is built for exactly the problem this essay describes: making sound decisions and keeping people steady while the larger questions stay open. Start with the free Mode Finder assessment, which shows you how you tend to lead under pressure, and then work through the practical tools behind it.