The Great Exhaustion

It’s been almost four years since the coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a period of sustained upheaval for knowledge workers. The first wave of change came in early 2021, with the Great Resignation—a mass exodus from the workforce that saw, at its peak, millions of Americans quitting their jobs each month. Then, in 2022, we got the Remote-Work Wars, in which bosses who’d thought of working from home as a temporary measure were surprised when employees claimed it as a right. “Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do,” a group of disgruntled Apple employees wrote in a letter to management after their C.E.O., Tim Cook, proposed repopulating the company’s offices, including its headquarters, which had opened only five years earlier at a cost of five billion dollars.