How Burnout Breaks Resistance

When exhaustion becomes collective, it doesn’t just silence individuals — it reshapes what societies accept, expect, and believe can change.

Oct 07, 2025

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Dear friends

In my last post, here, I laid out why we cannot think about burnout only as a workplace problem. Contrary to conventional belief, it doesn’t just begin in our jobs and extend beyond them — it often begins elsewhere. But while burnout from professional demands or the strain of daily life is difficult, there is usually a way to step back from the triggers. We can set new boundaries, slow the pace for a time, change roles perhaps, or take leave. Those pauses make our recovery possible.

Under advancing authoritarianism, the pressures that lead to burnout are built into our daily lives. The strain doesn’t start at work — it starts with the constant effort to stay safe, informed, and upright in a system designed to keep us off balance. And the triggers cannot be switched off — the crises, the disinformation, the threats keep coming.

When that strain goes on without relief, burnout stops being an individual experience and becomes a collective condition. If we all simply wait until it overtakes us, our recovery — and resistance itself — will become far harder to reclaim. It’s not just because we’ve failed to manage our stress, but because the conditions we live under are designed to drain us.

That’s why we need to understand burnout not only as something that affects individuals, but as something that can reshape society itself.

Burnout changes the way we think and what we come to expect. Over time, it shapes what we believe is even possible to change. And it weakens the collective capacity of citizens to act, to speak, and to hold leaders to account. In authoritarian settings, that erosion is not accidental, but part of the terrain that allows power to consolidate.

So this is where we begin: with the ways in which burnout drains resistance itself.

Before we move to the science of stress, we need to understand how depletion weakens our ability to act together — and why authoritarian governments rely on our exhaustion to hold power.

Lowered expectations

Burnout works in subtle but powerful ways to weaken resistance. The first shift is that it lowers the threshold of what we come to accept as normal.

When we are exhausted, we simply don’t have the energy to fight for our rights, so we adapt by lowering our expectations of what government should deliver. When public offices lose our paperwork or take months to return a call, we begin to treat those wasted hours as an inevitability rather than something we should challenge. When early warnings for hurricanes, floods, or wildfires are cut, we stop fighting to have them restored, and instead begin relying on luck or word of mouth instead. What once we would have experienced as unacceptable failure simply becomes absorbed into the rhythm of our ordinary lives.

That shift is crucial for an authoritarian regime. The more that we accept dysfunction as “just how things are”, the less pressure the state faces to make improvements. Instead of being judged by their promises or stated principles, the bar keeps dropping, until the only measure left is whether the government meets our basic needs for survival. As long as we can scrape by, we learn to live with conditions that would have been unacceptable in a healthy democracy.

You may think that’s unlikely in the United States, but when I moved to Zimbabwe, it seemed the closest thing to a utopia anyone could hope to find. Just a few years later, we queued for hours for basic goods. Power, phone network, and water outages had become weekly occurrences.

When every day feels like a struggle, our expectations shrink. The dysfunction of the state no longer stands out as shocking or temporary; it simply becomes part of daily life. We adapt to shortages, to failing services, to arbitrary rules, because we simply don’t have the capacity to push back.

Authoritarian leaders use that adaptation to their advantage, framing their rule as the only stable constant. Even when conditions deteriorate, to many, they still appear preferable to the chaos that might come from demanding change.

Withdrawal from collective action

Once our expectations fall, retreat follows. That shift often begins quietly, almost imperceptibly.

Collective action requires energy, time, and a sense of hope and possibility. When we are burnt out we have none of those things to spare. Instead of gathering in the streets, forming associations, or holding leaders accountable, we turn inward, because our personal instinct to conserve energy overrides our political impulse to demand change. So we start to focus our energy on the things we can still control — keeping our job, caring for family, getting through the week.

The demands of collective life begin to feel too heavy: meetings that run long, campaigns that stall, conversations that never seem to change anything. So we step back, telling ourselves it’s only temporary, that we’ll re-engage when things calm down.

Over time, that pause becomes a pattern. Resistance groups thin out, movements lose their organisers, neighbourhood efforts fade. Our instinct to survive begins to outweigh our instinct to resist.

It isn’t indifference that drives our withdrawal, but depletion. We conserve our energy because it feels scarce, and in doing so, we unwittingly drain the shared reservoir that makes collective action possible.

Breakdown of coordination and trust

As we begin to pull back, the small threads that hold collective life together start to loosen. The groups and networks that once shared information, pooled resources, or offered moral support begin to lose touch. Messages take longer to answer. Meetings are postponed. Coordination that once happened almost automatically now takes more effort, more patience, more persistence than most of us can sustain. And the misunderstandings that once could be cleared with a quick call or conversation begin to linger, stretching the distance between us a little further each time.

What used to feel like cooperation starts to feel like strain.

Over time, that strain affects our capacity to trust. People grow unsure of who is still involved, who has the capacity to take on work, and who might quietly have stepped away. Even small gaps in communication create uncertainty, and that uncertainty multiplies. Doubt settles in — not dramatic or sudden, but steady — and with it, we hesitate. Coalitions that once spoke in unison begin to break into smaller groups, each focused on staying afloat. Holding a movement together starts to demand more energy than advancing its cause, and slowly, the shared momentum that once felt unbreakable begins to fade.

An authoritarian administration doesn’t need to suppress every voice — it only needs to keep those voices from speaking together. When we no longer believe others will show up, collective action will stop before it begins. Exhaustion, uncertainty, and mistrust achieve what censorship or repression once did, thinning the space for dissent until it can be managed without force.

Normalisation of uncertainty and fear

As coordination falters, uncertainty tightens its grip. The rules shift without warning, information changes by the hour, and the boundaries of what is safe for us to say or do become harder for us to read. Instead, we learn to watch for signals — who was questioned, who was demoted, which words appeared in the news. Our goal is no longer focused on participation, but on the avoidance of mistakes. In that climate, caution becomes a survival skill.

Over time, this state of uncertainty starts to feel normal. We stop expecting consistency or fairness and begin to adapt to unpredictability instead, making quiet calculations about what we can risk and what must be avoided.

The effect is not open fear, but a low, steady vigilance that keeps us all on guard. That vigilance is draining, and it does the government’s work for it: when we spend our energy staying safe, we have little left to spend on staying engaged.

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Collapse of time and imagination

As our exhaustion deepens, our sense of time begins to narrow.

In healthy democratic societies where institutions feel stable and responsive, we can afford to think years ahead. We willingly invest our time and energy in long-term projects — campaigning for education reform, strengthening local government, or protecting the environment — because we assume that the system will still be there to carry those efforts forward.

Burnout erodes that confidence. Under authoritarian rule, where crises are constant and energy is scarce, our sense of a future contracts. Instead of imagining what schools, courts, or public life should look like in twenty years, our worry shifts to how to make it through the week — or even the day. Long-term planning feels almost impossible when the ground under our feet is always shifting. The horizon collapses to the immediate present, and with it collapses our capacity to nurture or defend our institutions over time.

Hope depends on our ability to picture a world different from the one we inhabit, but when that collapse of time takes hold, our imagination follows. When we stop believing that change is possible, we stop imagining a future worth working towards. Without that, the horizon of possibility shrinks until survival becomes our only goal. We adapt not only to the hardship but to the belief that the hardship is permanent.

For an authoritarian government, this contraction is stabilising. A weary society that no longer believes in the future will not mobilise to change it. Power holds — simply because nothing feels possible beyond the present.

Burnout under authoritarian rule is not merely a symptom of strain — it is part of the strategy that keeps authoritarian power in place. It lowers our expectations, fragments cooperation, normalises fear, and collapses the future until all we can see is the day-to-day. Each step drains our capacity for shared resistance until our exhaustion itself becomes a form of control.

Recognising this pattern is our first act of refusal.

Understanding how depletion is manufactured allows us to see that recovery — personal and collective — is not indulgence but defiance. The work ahead is to learn how to restore and protect our energy and connection faster than authroitarian power can drain us, and how to rebuild the conditions that make sustained action possible.

That’s where we turn on Thursday: to the science of stress, and what it can teach us about repairing both the body and the body politic.

In solidarity, as ever

— Lori