In the decades that followed, an attention to this problem was often reframed but never went away. Today in the modern technological, global workplace one modern depiction of existential tiredness has been reframed in Germany as ‘burnout’. Perhaps the term has caught on because it is more flattering than ‘tiredness’, absolving the sufferer from the implications of indulgence that accompanies those said to suffer from ‘fatigue’ or ‘ennui’. After all, among other things ‘burnout’ suggests that the sufferer may have selflessly just given too much of themselves, with the implication that they have done so for the greater good. Yet although the term may have changed, the symptoms and causes of the old tiredness and the new burnout remain the same. They include a tiredness brought on by the peculiar speed and complexity of change in the modern world and work habits that are a result of modern capitalism and information technology. But burnout has also been attributed to the dislocation caused by contemporary secularism. In recent years so many books and articles on ‘burnout’ have appeared in the German press that some people have even complained of ‘burnout burnout’.1

If it is currently accepted that a person can suffer burnout, it seems less common today to accept that societies might suffer something similar. If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?

Writers and thinkers were not always as reluctant as they are today to accept such a possibility. One of the most bracingly pessimistic works of early twentieth-century German thought, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, argued precisely that. Spengler claimed that civilisations, like people, are born, flourish, decay and die, and that the West was somewhere in the latter stages of this process. Even if the standard rejection of Spenglerism – that one of the notable characteristics of Western culture is precisely that it permanently fears itself to be in decline – is true it still does not mean that at some point the self-pitying West may not be onto something. A generation earlier Nietzsche had considered the same possibility and saw some of the same warning signs. ‘We are no longer accumulating,’ he wrote in his late notebooks. ‘We are squandering the capital of our forebears, even in our way of knowing.’2