Hurry, hurry.
A galloping horse can exceed the limits of its organism.
If you force him, he'll go faster than his heart can handle.
On the racecourses, the thoroughbreds of the races do not stop, rather they fall struck down, killed by speed.
“Fatigue” in Latin meant “to be about to burst”;
Originally, the term was applied to horses, trained by their riders to ride until they burst.
That fatigue turned against us and we human beings have inherited the prohibition of curbing rampant fatigue.
The frenzy of exhausted life is not a modern invention.
Twenty-two centuries ago, Plutarch already envisioned the endless days and marathon extracurricular activities of our children: "Some parents, striving so that their children are the first quickly in everything, impose excessive work on them, with which they faint."
Plants grow, he tells us, when we water them sparingly, but they drown in too much water.
Thus, children also need respite from their tasks: without rest, energy and enthusiasm will languish.
As the Greek historian writes, the strings of the bows and the lyres must be loosened to later recover their tension.
In our interconnected world, excessive task anxiety has invaded all spheres of life.
Attrition —technically known as
burnout
syndrome— can affect almost everyone, but certain character traits make us more vulnerable: the most involved people —vocational, sensitive and efficient, that is, true whips for themselves— are more likely to suffer this debilitating implosion.
Perfectionism causes its flaws.
When tiredness soaks into the bones, it becomes disease.
Indifferent and mechanical, we make mistakes that we will have to fix with more effort.
Although it may seem paradoxical, to move forward you must know how to stop.
The machines, born to take over from us in the toughest tasks, have unexpectedly accentuated our exhausted condition.
in
modern times
, by Charlie Chaplin, human beings are mute and only technologies speak.
Charlot is subjected to a perfidious device conceived to feed the workers while they continue to perform under the motto: "Eliminate the hour of rest, you will no longer need it".
As the poignant tramp smokes a lazy cigarette in the factory toilets, the manager appears on a huge monitor to order him back to the assembly line.
Although the film was released in 1936, it lucidly portrays our present plagued by videoconferences, worker tracking applications and cell phones on the rampage.
Ninety years later, that bathroom scene is less dystopian than it was in its time.
Today technology engulfs our lives like a voracious gear, a cannibalistic machine that feeds on our time.
In the roaring twenties, the German filmmaker Fritz Lang had already denounced the dark and cruel subsoil that sustained the apparent prosperity.
In the underground of
Metropolis
, the perfect city, there is a huge industrial machine that, pushed to the limit, transforms into a biblical monster - Moloch - and ends up engulfing the exhausted workers with its jaws of fire.
According to rabbinical tradition, Moloch was a bronze statue inside which burned a perpetual fire into which sacrificial victims were thrown.
Symbolically, Lang prophesied our current
burnout
, which precisely means being burned out.
Wearable technologies hold us down and trap us in their suffocation nets.
We cannot relax because its omnipresence has even invaded our pause spaces.
Life goes by with the heartbeat and rhythm of the machine, until the old border between the professional and the personal is erased.
Although it is necessary to be very strong to live so tired, we continue in the race, like horses with a pounding heart.
In these galloping times, when it takes so much effort to rest, intimacy and siesta have become gestures of resistance: close your eyes and you will see.
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