The New Yorker [read free]: After successive waves of post-pandemic change, worn-out knowledge workers need a fresh start. “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…Eventually, in many organizations, the fervor of the Remote-Work Wars settled into an uneasy truce that was based on hybrid schedules. But then, last summer, a third wave of disruption emerged. “I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting,” the narrator of a viral TikTok video began. “You’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.” Many young professionals embraced the idea, filling social platforms with sympathetic declarations before they, in turn, weathered a derisive backlash. The over-all impression, throughout these years of turbulence, was that knowledge work was broken: somehow, its expectations, rhythms, and burdens needed to be redefined. Today, at the close of 2023, there no longer seems to be a revolutionary project roiling the knowledge sector. The business-news cycle is dominated by coverage of A.I. or old-fashioned labor strikes, with little apparent excitement left for reforming knowledge work as a whole. Office workers seem to have retreated into a pervasive atmosphere of fatigue…The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.”