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When exhaustion is widespread, it reflects how work and life are designed, not personal weakness.

When effort never changes conditions, people can learn to stop trying.

Real resilience requires redesigning systems instead of simply training individuals to tolerate them.

During World War II, B-17 bombers kept belly-landing because pilots were pressing the wrong switch. On the face of things, it looked like pilot error. Then a young psychologist named Alphonse Chapanis observed that two switches—one for the landing flaps and the other for the landing gear—sat next to each other and looked the same. A pilot worn out by hours of combat could easily reach for the wrong one as he came in to land. So Chapanis fitted a small wheel to the gear lever and a flap-shaped wedge to the flap control.

The confusion largely disappeared.

Most of us aren’t flying bombers, but we do live in a world in which nothing feels settled. Technology, work, the economy, politics, and the institutions we once trusted are all shifting at once. This breeds exhaustion and burnout. When people struggle, we prescribe resilience training. When the news becomes unbearable, we suggest a digital detox.

In effect, we keep telling the pilots to be more careful. But what if the problem isn’t the pilots at all but the system around them? What if rather than people failing to adapt to the world we have built, the world we have built is failing to account for the people who must live in it?

Exhaustion Is a System Output

When one person gets burnout, it makes sense to send them to a doctor. But when exhaustion shows up across entire workforces, professions, and generations, it is time to look at system design. As burnout experts Christina Maslach........

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