Distracted and Exhausted

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

The Washington Post says “Americans are tired.”

 

That’s not a figurative statement or a description of an attitude. Like “I’m tired of these snakes on this plane” or “I’m tired of people named Todd.” A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that a lot of Americans are frequently feeling physically fatigued.  

 

But I think figurative fatigue and literal fatigue might be more linked than we often appreciate.

 

I don’t think anyone is shocked to learn that I don’t spend a lot of time chopping wood or clearing boulders from fields. I spend an enormous amount of time producing or consuming words from a seated position. And yet, I’m tired all the time. If you have a job that requires you to concentrate for long stretches of time, you know how tiring basically sitting still all day can be.

 

Now, in my case, some of this obviously has to do with my comparatively crapulent lifestyle. But I’m not really all that bacchanalian (anymore). Rather, I just have a hard time turning off my brain.

 

And I think that maybe that’s one reason why people are tired. We increasingly live in an attention economy—and paying attention to things can be exhausting. So can having your attention to one thing constantly disturbed by other things demanding your attention. Big chunks of our days are like playing that old game “Operation,” trying to use tweezers to remove a liver or spleen without lighting up the patient’s nose, while people are saying, “Did you hear what Trump said?” “Look at this video of a puppy sleeping with a monkey!” “Here’s how you can use Claude to organize your closet!” The news—and media outfits pretending to be in the news business—is full of stuff demanding you not only pay attention to it, but worry about it. Once Claude organizes your closet, it will destroy humanity. Ticks are not only coming back, they’ll make you allergic to cheeseburgers.

 

In the old days, if I wanted a distraction, I’d pick up a magazine and thumb through it. Now, if I want to do the digital equivalent, there’s a good chance I’ll have to re-sign into the website, but I won’t remember my password, so I’ll have to create a new one and have a temporary password emailed to me, at which point I will have to answer the Sphinx’s three questions. Or if I’m lucky enough to avoid that, I’ll get hit with a video I don’t want to watch and have to figure out how to turn off. Or if I get halfway through an article, I might need to click on the “click here to read more” button, which I only realized I scrolled past when I started reading an advertorial about managing, of all things, my cortisol levels.

 

My more reliable habit for distraction or procrastination is my dear friend, the TV. But in my new apartment, I use the Apple TV interface, and channel surfing is now like navigating between six different folders on a 1980s-era MS-DOS computer. Even if I’ve DVR’d something on YouTube TV, I get hit with ads that I can’t quite fast-forward through but have the option of beaming to my phone, because that’s something I really want to do.

 

Don’t even get me started on Google, the premier enshittified product of the last few years.

 

In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.” (You know a neologism is capturing something real when it’s made “Word of the Year”  by the American Dialect Society within 12 months of its coinage.) He describes how this works: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

 

There’s part of me that should welcome this process as vindication of Schumpeterian creative destruction. It wasn’t long ago that Very Serious People were telling us that Google was the sort of monopoly that defied “market fundamentalist” faith in such things.

 

But I don’t want to write about that (today). Rather, I want to get back to why people are tired. A few years ago, historian Rick Perlstein tried to argue that the inflation of the 1970s wasn’t a big deal in economic terms. Rather, inflation was a kind of culture-war metaphor:

 

The conclusion I’ve drawn is that this was a form of moral panic. The 1970s was when the social transformations of the 1960s worked their way into the mainstream. “Inflation spiraling out of control” was a way of talking about how more permissiveness, more profligacy, more individual freedom, more sexual freedom had sent society spiraling out of control. “Discipline” from the top down was a fantasy about how to make all the madness stop.

 

Now, I agree with all of Perlstein’s critics that this was mostly ridiculous. But there’s a serious point lurking in there. The ridiculous part is obvious. Inflation really is bad. American purchasing power in the 1970s was cut in half because of inflation. But Perlstein wanted to minimize this very real badness because he wanted to talk about how great cost-of-living adjustments from labor unions are, because labor unions are awesome and right-wingers are paranoid, or something.

 

What the critics didn’t fully grant is that the effects of inflation mess with you in non-economic ways. In Weimar Germany, a status-obsessed middle class saw its economic security evaporate and with it its sense of itself and the broader society. An economic crisis fueled a social crisis and precisely the kind of moral panic Perlstein was talking about. It’s perfectly defensible to argue that economic insecurity fuels moral panics that have non-economic components. Because when the economy feels out of control, it’s easier to think everything else is out of control, too.

 

Imagine writing about the COVID-19 era and saying that the protests, fights, and mass derangement of that period had little or nothing to do with the pandemic. Pandemics mess with your brain for all sorts of evolutionary, psychological, and emotional reasons. The COVID era was marked by a lot of moral panics, on the left and the right. The George Floyd protests, the internal riot at the New York Times, the anti-vax idiocy: These are all worth criticizing on the merits. But they were all ignited by the fact that we were experiencing a massive global pandemic.

 

Inflation has a similar effect. You see its effects everywhere, but you can’t really see the thing itself. When you’re pissed off that you can’t provide for your family the basics you feel entitled to by virtue of your education, status, hard work, etc., you’re much more likely to listen to demagogues who tell you your problems are the fault of the Jews, or Indian Americans, or illegal immigrants. One reason a lot of people ignored Trump’s demagoguery and deranged rhetoric in his first term was because the economy was doing well. One reason his demagoguery and deranged rhetoric is bothering a lot of his former fans now is that it’s not doing so well. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it is.

 

Objectively, the economy isn’t that bad. But it feels bad for some of the reasons I alluded to above. For instance, I think the “subscription” economy is freaking out a lot of people, much like inflation does. I know a lot of very prosperous people who feel overwhelmed by the constant nickel-and-diming of subscriptions for everything: newsletters, apps, cable, satellite radio, Amazon products, even Wi-Fi for your car. At The Dispatch we’re honored to have a very low subscriber churn rate. But often when someone tells me they’re unsubscribing, I get an apology. “It’s not you guys! I just need to take control of my subscriptions!” Heck, one of the reasons we have a nice number of lifetime subscribers (other than our outstanding offerings) is that some folks just don’t want to think about renewing anymore.

 

I think one of the reasons nostalgia for often-backbreaking factory jobs is so acute is that people aren’t just nostalgic for the 1950s American dream that some unnamed neoliberal “they” took from us. They’re nostalgic for a secure job that people believe didn’t require the kind of concentration that is part of almost everything today.

 

The burrito debate of last month had a lot to do with stupid wagon-circling around J.D. Vance, but it also had a lot to do with the exhaustion of an on-demand economy that crams the costs of convenient home delivery onto a generation of young people who take home delivery for granted.

 

It’s a cliché to say that in the digital economy if you’re not paying for something it’s because you’re the product. There’s a lot of truth to that. Companies sell your data, and the people buying it do so for a reason. And that reason manifests itself in all sorts of exhausting ways. Algorithms feed you stuff that keeps you engaged and distracted at the same time. The engagement and distraction are two sides of the same coin.

 

I love the angry reaction to Sydney Sweeney’s ads for an online betting app because they are arousing, uh, controversy. Apparently, a barely clad, hot woman posing with sports equipment undermines women’s sports. I don’t really see it; I think I need to study the ads more closely. But what’s amazing to me is the way people are ignoring the fact that the betting app she’s shilling for is part of a trend that is undermining all sports and doing far worse to men.

 

I don’t want to shock anyone, but men today do not lack for opportunities to see naked, never mind near-naked, women on the internet. This is not new. What is new is that people can gamble on virtually everything and anything at any time of day. That’s bad for sports, but it’s worse for men—and it’s mostly a male problem. They are going into debt, saving less, eating out less, etc., because of the costs of online gambling. Half of men between 18 and 49 have an active online betting account, and 1 in 5 of them have had trouble paying their bills because of gambling losses. More than half of them have chased losses in the hope of catching up, and more than a third have felt ashamed of their losses.

 

I don’t know if this has the exact same effect as inflation or a pandemic, but I think the similarities are more significant than the differences. Add in persistent inflation, the constant ratcheting up of things to worry about—real and alleged—being pelted at you constantly, and it’s no surprise people are constantly on edge and exhausted. Any day now AI is going to take all of our jobs, or just kill us. Global warming has receded as an existential crisis, but it’s still a go-to for doom-mongers in need of copy. Trump will end democracy. No, his enemies will end it if he loses. The left will make your kids trans. The right wants to deport all of the brown people. The attention whores of the left and right can at least agree that the Jews are responsible for your sense of unease.  

 

I’m not saying we don’t have real problems; Lord knows we do. I’m just saying that the institutionalization and commodification of panic is no good for anybody. And it’s making me oh-so-tired.