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Too Tired to Do Anything, Too Empty to Do Nothing
Too Tired to Do Anything, Too Empty to Do Nothing
— Friedrich Nietzsche
When I got my first camera, my dad told me to always recharge the battery right after use. He said batteries have memory: If they are not fully charged after use, they will “remember” the partial charge, say 60%, and treat that as full. Even if the display shows 100%, the real capacity remains diminished. I feel like that uncharged battery. I go through my day draining energy, but I never really recover, nor do I know how to. Over time, my body has become accustomed to this low-battery mode. I am either too tired to do anything or too empty to do nothing.
Too tired to do anything
Exhausted, I scroll through my phone or binge-watch TV. My body stays still—I am not moving, not “doing much”—so I tell myself I am resting. But in reality, I’m surrounded by stimulation: flashing images, abrupt sounds, emotional triggers. How can something so activating be restorative? That feels counterintuitive. Yet our default strategy for “rest” is to sink into entertainment. It’s easy. It’s enjoyable. But it’s not rest. We’ve conflated entertainment and rest, and I think this is quietly costing us.
This blurred distinction reminds me of Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry. Mass-produced media, they argued, provide just enough passive pleasure to make workers feel as if they’ve recovered without truly restoring them. It’s not rest. It’s sedation. The illusion of replenishment keeps us functional, not fulfilled.
Entertainment—TV, social media, games—demands little from us, so it feels like downtime. It provides emotional simulations, such as laughter, tears, and suspense. While these replicate real emotional releases, or catharsis, they remain only a simulated version of it. Like taking Advil for recurring pain: the symptom fades, but the cause persists. Unlike physical pain, time might bring healing. But time alone doesn’t refill our energy.
We underestimate the cost of cognitive energy, particularly in the act of what we consider “relaxing.” Although the human brain comprises only 2–3% of our body weight, it uses up to 25% of our daily energy. Thinking, making decisions, and even scrolling deplete this supply. We assume we are at rest because the effort feels minimal. However, the brain doesn’t distinguish between active work and passive attention in terms of energy consumption.
Too empty to do nothing
We often say we want rest, but what we really crave is just a different kind of stimulation. Not work, but something that feels just as captivating. At work, we are inundated with tasks, challenges, and demands that keep us on high alert. This constant input excites us, but also dulls us. Over time, the feeling of being overwhelmed becomes familiar. Addictive. Without it, we feel anxious, even bored.
So we repackage stimulation as “leisure”: travel, exercise, shopping, dining out, and massages. None of these are inherently bad, but they aren’t restful. They are less efficient and more aestheticized forms of work, actions that require energy and attention without generating capital. And more ironically, we pay to do them.
We build a parallel world of stimulation just outside the office. A world designed to feel different from work, while still retaining its intensity. Anything that keeps us busy (occupies us) feels “restful.” Byung-Chul Han calls this auto-exploitation: we become both the boss and the laborer, pushing ourselves to produce under the illusion of freedom. There’s no one to resist. No boss to blame. Just a cycle of self-driven exhaustion.
On a recent trip, a friend and I got obsessed with cold plunges. We kept alternating between icy water and hot springs. “I like feeling numb,” she said. The cold numbs our bodies, while the heat restores our senses. Numbness. Stimulation. We sought both. But why numb ourselves when so much of life already feels numb? Were we trying to feel more alive, or just to feel something?
What if all this something is just a new way to exhaust ourselves? Instead of resting, we are just rehearsing pseudo-rest.
Energy loans
Just as we create environments of constant stimulation for rest, we also begin to supplement ourselves with stimulants for extra strength. When I feel sluggish, I naturally turn to stimulants. For many, that means coffee, energy drinks, or sugar. For me, it’s a mint called Neuro that I recently discovered. Marketed as an aid for energy and focus, Neuro is packed with natural caffeine, L-theanine, and vitamins B12 and B6. It works. After taking it, I can feel a noticeable energy boost. However, each time I take it, I find it increasingly difficult to recover from exhaustion. It’s similar to taking melatonin to help sleep, but it leaves me feeling groggy all day.
I started thinking in terms of the conservation of energy: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. What if these so-called energy boosters don’t actually “give” us energy at all? What if they borrow it from our future reserves? It would be like taking out a short-term energy loan: you get the boost now, but pay it back later with added fatigue. The boost is real—so is the debt. The total energy always stays the same. We just redistribute it, inefficiently, and at a loss.
While normalizing low-energy mode, we rely on chemical and cultural fixes. Instead of resting, we stimulate. This not just leads to burnout, but a miscalibration of what rest actually is. We train ourselves to run on empty. To stay depleted. To stay occupied. In doing so, we grow further and further away from ourselves. Perhaps that is why self-motivation feels so elusive now: we have outsourced our drive to caffeine, deadlines, and dopamine loops. The more we rely on these external stimulants, the less capacity we have to generate momentum from within. Like batteries trained to expect 60% as full, we mistake our numbness for restoration.
What if we have forgotten what full actually feels like? What if rest is not something we do, but rather, something we remember how to be?
1. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2020.
2. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002.
3. Markman, Art. “Influence People by Leveraging the Brain’s Laziness.” Harvard Business Review, May 29, 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/05/influence-people-by-leveraging-the-brains-laziness.
4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, 1982.