Remember that moment when you opened your laptop on a Monday morning and just… stared? The cursor blinked, the inbox overflowed, and something inside you quietly whispered, “I can’t do this anymore.” If that scene felt familiar in 2025, you weren’t alone. In fact, you were part of a massive, collective exhale that finally had a name: worker fatigue.
It wasn’t dramatic like the Great Resignation or sudden like pandemic layoffs. It was slower, heavier, more insidious. It crept in through endless Slack pings, another “quick sync” at 5:30 pm, the quiet dread of opening LinkedIn to see yet another round of cuts. By the end of the year, one word kept appearing everywhere people talked honestly about work: fatigue.
The Year We All Ran Out of Battery
Something shifted in 2025. The job market didn’t collapse – economists kept saying it was “cooling, not crashing” – but it didn’t feel stable either. Hiring slowed to a crawl. Salaries barely budged while rent and groceries kept climbing. And every week brought a fresh headline designed to spike your cortisol: mass layoffs at another tech giant, a new AI tool that could supposedly do your job in half the time, a CEO proudly announcing “back to office, five days a week, no exceptions.”
No wonder people started describing themselves as “running on empty.” It wasn’t just a catchy phrase. Mentions of the word fatigue in workplace conversations jumped over 40% compared to the previous year. That’s not noise – that’s a signal.
Five Years of Non-Stop Turbulence
Let’s be honest: we never really got a breather after 2020. The pandemic broke our routines, remote work rewrote the rules, then return-to-office mandates tried to pretend none of it happened. Supply-chain chaos turned into inflation anxiety. The 2022 layoff wave never fully ended – it just changed zip codes and industries.
By the time 2025 rolled around, most of us were operating on a kind of emotional overdraft. We’d learned to expect the unexpected so often that even “good” news – like a stable job – felt temporary. Resilience sounds heroic until you realize you’ve been running on it for half a decade straight.
“We’ve had five years of a roller coaster that never quite stopped at the station. It’s not surprising people are drained.”
– Lead economist at a major career platform
The Four Horsemen of 2025 Burnout
If you had to pinpoint what made this year uniquely exhausting, four big themes kept surfacing again and again.
- Political noise on steroids. Election cycles always rattle workplaces, but 2025 felt relentless. Conversations about policy changes, trade wars, and regulation uncertainty bled into every lunch break and Slack channel.
- Economic whiplash. Everyone could feel prices rising faster than paychecks. The word “stagflation” – that ugly mix of stagnant growth and stubborn inflation – started showing up in regular conversations, not just economics blogs.
- AI everywhere, all at once. One day you’re doing your job; the next day there’s a demo of an “agentic” AI that supposedly thinks like a senior strategist. Even people whose roles felt safe started side-eyeing the bots.
- Layoff PTSD. Even if your company wasn’t cutting, someone you knew was affected. The fear never went away; it just became background radiation.
Taken separately, any one of those would be manageable. Combined? They created the perfect storm for collective exhaustion.
The Great Disconnect Between Bosses and Everyone Else
Here’s the part that really stings: while employees were hitting empty, leadership seemed to be reading from a different script entirely.
Companies doubled down on “efficiency” initiatives, rolled out aggressive RTO policies, and bragged about AI-powered productivity gains – all while headcount stayed flat or dropped. The message felt clear: do more with less, faster, in person, and please look grateful while you’re at it.
Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work were thinking, “I’m already giving everything I’ve got.” The irony is almost comical: organizations obsessed with squeezing out an extra 5% productivity while their workforce is running on fumes and disengagement.
“If people don’t believe extra effort will be rewarded, they simply won’t give it. You can’t mandate engagement.”
Quiet Quitting? More Like Quiet Surviving
Remember when “quiet quitting” was the big trend a couple years ago? In 2025 it felt less like a trend and more like basic self-preservation.
People weren’t dramatically coasting – they were rationing energy. Doing the job, meeting deadlines, but declining the 8 pm “optional” planning session for a project that probably wouldn’t move the needle. Saying no to stretching themselves across three roles because “we’re lean right now.” Protecting the few hours they had left for family, health, or just staring at a wall.
Some leaders called it entitlement. Most employees called it survival.
The Job Market That Looked Fine on Paper
Here’s the cruelest part: officially, things weren’t that bad. Unemployment stayed low-ish. Recession predictions kept getting pushed back. From 30,000 feet, the economy was “resilient.”
But zoom in to actual human experience and the picture changed. Job openings existed – mostly senior roles requiring five niche tools and ten years of experience for “competitive” (read: 2019) pay. Junior and mid-level positions? Good luck. Ghost jobs littered the boards. Six rounds of interviews for a lateral move became standard.
People weren’t unemployed; they were underemployed in their own heads. Stuck in roles they’d outgrown, watching promotion tracks disappear, feeling their skills atrophy while AI hype made them question their future relevance. That’s a special kind of soul-draining.
So How Do You Keep Going When Everything Feels Heavy?
The truth is, no one has a magic fix. But there are ways to protect whatever energy you have left – and maybe even reclaim some.
- Stop waiting for permission to protect your time. Block focus hours on your calendar. Turn off notifications after 6 pm. Your boundaries only work if you enforce them.
- Find your people. Misery loves company, but so does solidarity. Private Slack groups, industry Discords, even anonymous forums – knowing you’re not the only one feeling this way helps more than you’d think.
- Rethink “loyalty.” Companies optimized for efficiency rarely return the favor. It’s okay to keep your résumé warm, take informational interviews, or start that side project you’ve been delaying.
- Celebrate tiny wins. Finished a task without your soul leaving your body? Victory. Took a lunch break outside? Gold star. We’re so conditioned to minimize survival that we forget it actually counts as progress right now.
- Reconnect with why you liked this work in the first place. Sometimes fatigue isn’t laziness – it’s loss of meaning. Can you mentor someone? Volunteer a skill? Work on a project that actually matters? Even small doses of purpose act like battery chargers.
And if you’re a manager reading this? The best thing you can do right now is acknowledge reality. A simple “I know this has been an incredibly hard year, and I see how hard you’re working” can buy more goodwill than another pizza party.
Looking Ahead: Will 2026 Be Any Different?
Nobody has a crystal ball, but some patterns feel inevitable. AI isn’t going anywhere. Economic uncertainty probably isn’t either. And companies have learned they can push pretty far before people push back en masse.
But fatigue has a way of creating its own momentum. When enough people reach empty, something has to give. Maybe it’s more companies realizing that treating humans like rechargeable batteries doesn’t actually work. Maybe it’s employees finally drawing harder lines. Or maybe we’re just in the messy middle of renegotiating what work is allowed to demand from us.
Either way, 2025 taught us something important: exhaustion isn’t personal failure. It’s feedback. And pretending otherwise just keeps the cycle going.
So if you ended this year feeling drained, give yourself permission to admit it. You’re not broken. You’re not lazy. You’re just human – and humans eventually reach limits.
The battery icon on your internal phone might be red right now. That’s okay. Red means it’s time to plug in, not try harder.
