I think a lot about exhaustion lately. Maybe because I’m often exhausted.
Whenever I feel this burnout, my mind always wanders back to history to look for the roots of things because I need to understand why we are the way we are, and why modern life feels so distinctly draining.
And while it’s easy to blame the phone in my hand, the truth is it goes deeper than the last 15 years.
The Year the Night Was Conquered
If you want to pinpoint the moment the modern anxiety began, you could make a strong case for a specific evening in 1803, at the Boulton & Watt Soho Foundry in Birmingham, England.
The human experience before 1803 was governed by a divinely appointed watcher: the sun. When the sun rose, the world woke. Men went out to the fields, the docks, or the workshops. They labored while the light held. But when the sun dipped below the horizon, the work had to stop. The darkness was an absolute boundary. It forced a rhythm of rest upon the world. The night belonged to the hearth, to the family, to the story told by firelight, and to sleep.
To blow out the candle was to surrender to God’s design for the universe.
But in 1803, William Murdoch, a Scottish engineer with a genius for tinkering, illuminated the facade of the Soho Foundry with gas lighting. It was a marvel of the age. Crowds gathered to gawk at the artificial day that burned with a hissing, yellow brilliance.
It was a triumph of engineering, but it was a catastrophe for us.
Suddenly, the factory owners realized a potent truth: If you can banish the dark, you can banish the end of the workday. The “shift” was born. The machines did not need to sleep, and now, neither did the men.
This was the moment we traded the cycle for the line. Before 1803, work was centered around a job, yes, but the job was not what controlled our life. There were bigger forces at work in the world besides his desire to make money. A man moved in rhythms: morning and evening, seedtime and harvest, summer and winter. He measured his life by the sprouting of crops and the place of the sun overhead. He knew who he was by where he stood in relation to the creation.
After 1803, time became linear. It became a resource to be mined, measured, and maximized. We moved from the era of the seasons to the era of the clock.
The consequences of this shift have been slow, subtle, and devastating. In the agrarian past, work had a physical cost, but it often left the spirit free to wander. A man plowing a field could watch the clouds; a shepherd could learn the stars. As we moved indoors, under the tyranny of the gas lamp and eventually the fluorescent bulb, the nature of the burden changed.
Work used to stoop our backs and take our eyes from heaven. Now, we stoop to the glow of cheap and banal rectangles, scrolling through spreadsheets and Slack channels, our spines curved not by the weight of grain, but by the weight of data.
Chronos Reigns
The Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is sequential time—seconds, minutes, hours. It is the time of the clock. Kairos is qualitative time—the “right” time, the moment of opportunity, the season. It is the time of the sunset, the conversation, the prayer. Kairos is the time we always wish we could have back when it’s gone.
The industrial revolution was the total victory of Chronos over Kairos. When we lit the lamps, we declared that every minute was equal to every other minute, and therefore every minute was capable of being monetized.
This creates a low-level, humming anxiety that pervades our work. In a world of Kairos, you work until the task is done or the light fails. In a world of Chronos, there is no “done.” There is only the clock. We are paid for our time, which means our time is no longer our own. It belongs to the company, the client, or the market.
In older liturgies and simpler times, there was a clear demarcation between the labor of the day and the rest of the evening. There was the blowing out of the candle. It was a ritualistic acknowledgment of limitation. “I have done what I can do today,” the gesture said. “The rest is in God’s hands.”
Today, the candle is never blown out. The gas lamp of 1803 has evolved into the LED screen of 2025, but the function is the same: to obliterate the boundary between labor and rest. The smartphone in your pocket is a factory whistle that can blow at 11:30 p.m. It is a portal through which the demands of the office can invade the sanctuary of the bedroom.
We are bathing our retinas in the blue light of eternal wakefulness, tricking our brains into believing it is always high noon, always harvest time, always time to produce.
The Theology of Limits
At its core, our addiction to the artificial light and the endless workday is a rejection of our creatureliness.
In the first chapter of Genesis, the rhythm of creation is established with a peculiar phrase: “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Note the order. The day begins with evening. It begins with rest. In the Hebrew imagination, the day starts when you go to sleep. This is a profound statement about who is in charge. It suggests that while we sleep, the work of the universe goes on, sustained by a God who “will neither slumber nor sleep.”
By starting the day with rest, we acknowledge that we are not the General Manager of the universe. We are limited. We are finite. We are dust.
The gas lamp and the shift work it enabled were humanity’s attempt to overcome this limitation. We wanted to be like God, existing in a perpetual state of productivity. But we were not designed for the perpetual. We were designed for the pause.
But the tower always falls. The body rebels. The burnout comes. The “terrible feeling” you have about your work is actually a mercy. It is your soul’s check engine light. It is a warning that you are trying to be a machine when you were made to be a man.
A Peaceful Rebellion
So, how do we live in 1803? We cannot smash the gas lamps. We cannot retreat into a Luddite fantasy of agrarian utopia. Most of us have mortgages to pay and children to educate, and that requires navigating the world of Chronos.
But we can choose to live distinctly within it. We can stage a quiet rebellion against the industrialization of our souls. We can rest. We can stop. We can blow out the candle.
