#4 Utopia of Play: the altar of exhaustion

(Post 4 in the series: Utopia of Play)

Or why Elon Musk pays someone to play his video games

In the last post, i traced how capitalism replaced play with games, promising transformation through transparent rules. How we're stuck performing adulthood in a system designed to keep us permanently dependent.

And how because of this system, we're too tired to imagine otherwise.

i want to look closely now at how the cage maintains itself. Not through explicit force, but through something more insidious: the weaponisation of work itself. The transformation of labour from means to end, with exhaustion worn as a badge of virtue.

Rules in the time of corona

Most recently in my own life, having left one of the most insidious corporate environments imaginable, it was possible to see in real time how the sycophancy works. How the submission to authority allows entire overhauls of the direction of the project on the whim of the HIPPO in the room. How despite warnings that these new directions would not work, everyone performs enthusiasm about the shift; all these radical missteps become justified as 'part of the process' rather than the obvious incompetence and mismanagement of resources that they could equally be called. A place where toxicity wasn't abstract, it was ambient. Like goldfish in a poisoned tank, people swimming in circles for years, never imagining a different way to be. Some of course, are attempting to change it from within. A respectable, if misguided, approach.

As i describe this i realise i could be talking about any large corporation, the same story exists in Google, Meta and beyond. Google's 'rest and vest' culture where employees literally do nothing for years whilst collecting salaries because the bureaucracy forgot they exist. Meta laying off 11,000 people by email in 2022, including engineers who'd just relocated their families internationally for the job. The Amazon warehouse where workers died during a tornado because they weren't allowed to leave their shifts. Many leave, some try to fight from the inside, neither option resulting in the type of change required to open the cage door. It's hard to dream when exhaustion becomes the air.

These are some of the most desirable jobs around and still they make tangible the contradiction between the supposed privilege of working there and the actual human cost of doing so.

It is crazy that this is pitched to us as success. Something to desire or aspire to.
i'm not even convinced this is living.

After years freelancing, stepping back into this corporate bowl was like breathing underwater. Every breath rationed, every gesture calibrated to performances of productivity. That company wasn't an exception, just a particularly sharp version of the same ecosystem that produces rigid rituals. Unquestioned loyalty. Silent punishments. You name it.

Then Covid hit. For a moment, the mask slipped. Suddenly, flexibility wasn't impossible. Work-life balance wasn't luxury, it was survival. We remembered what it was like to have time. To cook dinner. To see daylight. To exist in our bodies without monetising every moment.

Companies discovered, miraculously, that all the things they'd insisted were impossible for years could be implemented within weeks when forced by external regulation. Remote work? Suddenly seamless. Flexible hours? No problem. Trust-based management? Absolutely possible. The infrastructure that "couldn't" support work from home was up and running before the month was out.

The demands for physical presence, the surveillance, the inflexibility, none of it was necessary for the work to get done. It was necessary for control. And the moment that external force, government mandates, public health orders, were lifted, the control snapped back into place.

Watch what companies do when they're not being watched. They revert. Because the paternalism, the sudden care for employee wellbeing, was never genuine concern. It was compliance. Forced accommodation that evaporated the instant the force was removed. One wonders whether they'd have bothered with any of it, social distancing, masks, remote work, if they hadn't been legally required to. The evidence suggests not.

And then, just as quickly, the illusion closed again. The same leaders who praised "wellbeing" quietly reinstated surveillance tools and five-day return to office mandates. In one instance i recall, in late 2019, the VP of Product did not want anyone working from home, under any circumstances, until the office ran out of desks. We must work together was the reason given. Then, suddenly, we were asked to stay home two to three days a week so the team could grow. Apparently it was now possible to work effectively while being physically apart for some portion of the week. This type of illogical demand was happening before the world experienced Covid.

In another role, a few years after Covid hit, an email was sent out to the whole company reiterating that they had no desire to "return to the old ways," referring to the lack of flexibility pre-pandemic. We were told this would not be a step toward a five-day in-office environment. Weeks later we received that very demand. Somewhere the evidence of such exchanges are enshrined in email history. If this is a game, no one is having fun.

One can only laugh. And lick the boot. Or start planning the exit.

What makes this particular form of control so effective is the illogic itself appears to be the point. When demands contradict themselves within weeks, when policies reverse without explanation, when what you were praised for yesterday becomes grounds for discipline today - you learn that the rules don't matter. What matters is your willingness to comply regardless of whether the rules make sense.

This is about power asserting itself, not about productivity or efficiency or any of the business cases they dress it up in. It's about demonstrating that they can demand your physical presence for no reason other than because they can. That they can reverse course on a whim and you'll accept it. That they can make you commute two hours for a meeting that could have been an email, and you'll smile and say thank you.

The arbitrariness is a feature, not a bug. It keeps you off balance. It prevents you from developing any stable understanding of what's expected because what's expected keeps changing. And in that instability, you become hypervigilant, constantly scanning for signals, trying to anticipate what they'll want next, performing not just productivity but total availability, total compliance, total surrender of your time and body and attention.

David Graeber identified this as the hidden function of bureaucracy: not to make systems more efficient, but to demonstrate and perpetuate power through the imposition of meaningless rules. In his book The Utopia of Rules, he argues that bureaucratic procedures aren't rational despite their appearance of rationality. They're violence that requires the victim to fill out forms. They're power that makes you complicit in your own subjugation by forcing you to follow processes that serve no purpose except to remind you who's in charge.

The return-to-office mandates aren't about collaboration or company culture or any of the justifications offered. They're about reasserting control over bodies that briefly tasted freedom. The email reversals aren't mistakes, they're demonstrations. The illogical policies aren't failures of management, they're assertions of authority.

Graeber called this "the iron law of liberalism": those in power get to act capriciously, changing rules and expectations on a whim, whilst those subject to power must follow rules absolutely, even when those rules contradict themselves. The powerful get to be human and responsive to circumstances. Everyone else gets to be rigidly compliant.

As Michel Foucault warned, we don't just obey power: we internalise it. We become our own managers, tracking sleep, hacking mornings, optimising leisure. Trying to accommodate the policies, or navigate them in such a way that it won't cost you the chance of a promotion. But never stopping to ask why you'd want it in the first place, why the entire structure is allowed to perpetuate when so many of us would despise it if we stopped to look it in the eye.

This is the altar of exhaustion, and we're all worshipping at it, even as it demands our bodies, our time, our imaginations as sacrifice. And the altar will stop at nothing, including the demand for Mother Nature herself.

Action as agency

But the part of this experience i can't shake is: what was the point? Why did we rush so impulsively back to a world that was so clearly unable to serve us, us as human social beings desperate for time and communities and for our labour to serve a purpose.

While i watched corporate leaders refurbish their offices in lavish ritualistic flexes of power while telling staff there was no budget for bonuses, all i could think of is how nothing demonstrably meaningful for the betterment of myself or to improve the world around us came from these environments of dysfunction. The entire corporate world almost exists as its own tower of babel to capitalism, everyone speaking different corporate tongues, building higher and higher toward nothing. Dedicating entire lives to artificial rush, processes, hierarchy and the reinforcement of dysfunction.

Of course it has also been incredibly profitable. Someone's pockets were lined whilst thousands of people were exploited. Much of the obvious reasoning for return-to-office mandates ties into real estate value and landlord losses. Eye watering sums of money poured into capitalist playgrounds that could otherwise have contributed to solving actual human problems. With millions of people pouring 40+ hours a week of their time into work, how have we not already built a more equitable and desirable world? It seems absurd that so much labour has given us so little.

Meanwhile, the world burns and people are too busy doing rituals to capitalism to put the fire out. i was on a Zoom call about improving data tracking on a video game when Dnipro was bombed by Russia, and i wondered: is this living? When these tragedies strike closer to your loved ones it becomes impossible not to notice the absurdity of this entire structure, unless of course you numb yourself to it entirely.

This is precisely what Hannah Arendt revealed in her discussions on work. When labour colonises all available time, political action becomes impossible. Not just difficult. Impossible. We're optimising game metrics whilst cities burn. We're in meetings about meetings whilst democracy collapses. The world has become a stage for collapsing empires, and we're too exhausted to do anything but clock in. Practically speaking, i am sure we all have bills to pay on top of this.

But we're not just working at work anymore. The boundary between labour and life has dissolved entirely. This is what Ian Bogost calls "hyperemployment." Our phones turn us into perpetual workers. When you post on social media or check emails, you're doing unpaid work for companies that aggregate and resell your data. Rather than exploitation through wages, although we have that too, we do tiny bits of work for technology companies all day, every day.

The fetishisation of work runs deeper than offices. Every commute to sit at desks on calls, in calendars clogged with meetings that could have been silence, in paycheques that shrink against living costs. There's no time to imagine alternatives. And that's the point.

Action is what makes us fully human, Arendt argued. It's where we exercise freedom, where we reveal who we are through speech and deed, where we participate in shaping the world we share. But action requires the very thing our system forecloses: time. Energy. The mental space to think beyond survival. The capacity to imagine that things could be different. We're too tired to show up to community meetings. Too depleted to organise. Too anxious about our own precarity to think about collective solutions.

The prophets of the grind

"You just have to put in 80 to 100-hour weeks
- every week."

A quote from a coke addled creep tweeting so prolifically you'd think he's unemployed. The same one who paid someone else to grind his Diablo character to level 97 so he could cosplay as a gamer. Watch him closely: he's not working those 100 hours, he's shitposting, buying companies on ketamine logic, having public meltdowns that tank stock prices. But somehow that counts as "work" when he does it.

Meanwhile, his employees sleep under desks, piss in bottles, grind themselves to dust for the privilege of making him richer.

This is end-stage game logic: your 100-hour week makes his tweets possible. Your burned-out nervous system is his passive income. And when you finally break, he'll tweet about how "no one wants to work anymore" between rounds of Elden Ring that someone else is probably playing for him.

The prophets of hustle culture share a telling pattern: they preach the gospel of grind whilst systematically outsourcing the labour that makes their lifestyle possible. Jeff Bezos preaches customer obsession whilst warehouse workers develop chronic injuries meeting impossible quotas. Tech founders glorify "monk mode" productivity whilst nannies raise their children and personal assistants manage their lives. The venture capitalist tweets about 5am routines whilst an underpaid executive assistant coordinates his calendar, a meal prep service delivers his optimised nutrition, and a cleaner maintains the minimalist aesthetic that signals his discipline.

The performance is the point. When a CEO posts about grinding through weekends, he's not describing work, he's demonstrating that his time is his own to spend, even if he chooses to spend it working. The warehouse worker who actually grinds through weekends has no choice. That's the difference. The prophet of grind gets to perform exhaustion as virtue. The person actually exhausted just gets exhausted.

Max Weber was documenting this transformation before the tech boom, before hustle culture, before the gospel of grind became a religion with its own prophets and martyrs: how religious anxiety became work discipline, how salvation through grace became salvation through productivity. Now the altar isn't in a church, it's in an open-plan office. The sacrifice isn't symbolic, it's your actual body, your actual time, your actual capacity to imagine anything beyond the next sprint.

Output became virtue. Stillness became sin. Leisure wasn't a right, it was a transaction. You earned it, like a reward. And only after you'd performed.

Under capitalism, play is only permitted when it performs. When it produces. When it dresses itself up in the aesthetics of work: disciplined, strategic, monetisable. Play is safe only when it imitates labour. Otherwise, it's a risk we must apologise for.

This cultural logic surfaces in my own life. As someone who does many things purely for joy or learning, i've noticed how quickly that triggers suspicion. i have noticed the subtle, constant correlation between paid labour and perceived legitimacy. The skills i can monetise feel valuable. The ones i can't, the ones i love, feel harder to justify. i ask myself: is this only a hobby until i can live off it? At what point does it "count"? Can i still invest in myself, for the joy of it, if there is no return on investment?

Even the things we make in our spare time, art, writing, crafts, stories, are diminished through the language of "hobbies." Dismissed as indulgent. Frivolous. Less-than. Even when they require skill, discipline, creativity. The problem isn't the work. It's that these forms don't guarantee profit. They aren't legible to capital. And the value system of capital attaches itself to them, even when we don't intend for it to.

This anxiety creeps into everything. Even as i write, even as i play, even as i tend to something joyful, i feel that internalised voice: what are you making? What are you worth?

Hedonia

Even our leisure becomes colonised by the same logic as work. Mark Fisher called it depressive hedonia: hollow pleasure where we seek numbness, not joy. The system doesn't just steal our time, it curates our desires. You're not resting. You're doomscrolling. You're not choosing joy. You're choosing the least painful way to become functional again.

Fisher traced how late capitalism doesn't just demand our labour, it demands our attention, our dreams, our unconscious. We can't escape even in sleep because we're anxious about tomorrow's deadlines. We can't relax because relaxation feels like falling behind. We can't play because play doesn't produce anything quantifiable.

South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this the achievement society. We no longer need bosses to exploit us, we exploit ourselves. We internalise productivity so deeply that even joy feels like failure if it doesn't produce something. Your mindfulness has metrics. Your hobbies need hustle. Your morning routine requires optimisation. Your relationships become networking opportunities.

Han argues that we've moved from a disciplinary society, where power operates through external surveillance and punishment, to an achievement society, where power operates through self-exploitation disguised as freedom. You're not forced to work 80-hour week, you choose to. You're not ordered to check email at midnight, you just can't help yourself. The violence is self-inflicted, which makes it harder to resist because there's no clear oppressor, just your own inability to be productive enough, successful enough, optimised enough.

Culture theorist Lauren Berlant described how we stay attached to fantasies that harm us. She called it "cruel optimism," when the thing you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing. We keep grinding because we think rest is on the other side of output. We think joy is something that can be earned. We can't see the whole structure is designed to withhold it.

Berlant's concept helps explain why we accept conditions that exhaust us. We're optimistic that if we just work hard enough, hustle long enough, optimise perfectly enough, we'll finally achieve the good life we've been promised. But that optimism is cruel because the promise itself is the mechanism of our exploitation. The carrot stays forever out of reach, and we blame ourselves for not running fast enough rather than questioning why we're running at all.

These aren't just theories. Look at how we "relax": Instagram stories of self-care routines that require purchasing products. LinkedIn posts about weekend side hustles that turn hobbies into income streams. TikToks of morning routines optimised for productivity, complete with affiliate links to the supplements and apps that make it possible. We're not even living any more, we're performing living. Every moment becomes content. Every experience becomes material for personal branding.

Even our protests became aesthetic. Black squares on Instagram instead of organising. Hashtag activism instead of actual resistance. We consume the image of change rather than creating it. We perform solidarity whilst scrolling through atrocities between sponsored posts. The algorithm rewards performance, not action.

There's a famous quote by Fredric Jameson where he says "it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Leisure becomes not liberation but distraction, a buffer against utopian desire. We're allowed to imagine apocalypse, zombies, nuclear winter, alien invasion. But imagining a world without bosses? Without rent? Without the forty-hour work week? That's utopian fantasy. That's unrealistic. That's naive.

"it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Cultural theorist Theodor Adorno wrote about what he called the "culture industry" - about how mass entertainment under capitalism doesn't liberate us but keeps us pacified. He argued that the leisure we're sold isn't really leisure at all. It's designed to reproduce the conditions that make us good workers: passive, uncritical, too drained to imagine alternatives. The songs, the films, the shows they're standardised products that give us just enough pleasure to keep us consuming, but never enough to make us feel truly alive or dangerously free.

Adorno is also the man who hated TV and jazz, who treated fun like a moral failure. His disdain for entertainment, his absolute opposition to the popular, always struck me as unnecessarily severe. When i first came across him in university, he reminded me of a certain kind of man, you know the type, who refuses to enjoy anything unless it's obscure, punishing, or politically "serious." The kind who rates every film three stars and calls joy or fun "basic." Nothing is good enough for this cultural auteur, who treats enthusiasm like character flaw.

It's true that Adorno's observations sometimes come across like an insufferable dating profile. But i'll admit, what once felt like elitist pessimism now reads, disturbingly, like prophecy. When i catch myself doomscrolling after work, or numbing out to yet another algorithm-shaped series, i feel it, that watered down version of leisure. Not rest. Just recovery. Just enough to make me functional again. Adorno would say that's exactly the point: the culture industry doesn't want us rested and dangerous. It wants us numbed and compliant. Our "free time" keeps us just functional enough to clock back in.

The aesthetic of busyness requires constant performance. You're not just working, you're demonstrating that you're working. The Slack message sent at 11pm. The email timestamped 6am. The LinkedIn humble-brag about "no days off." The Instagram story from the airport captioned "grinding." The podcast about optimising your morning routine. The app that tracks your productivity. The course on how to hustle harder, how to monetise your hobbies.

We've created an entire industry around performing exhaustion. Productivity porn. Hustle culture. Rise and grind. The aesthetic isn't about actual output, it's about appearing perpetually busy. It's capitalist virtue signalling and we've invited it from the office into our homes, our social media profiles, and probably even our thoughts.

This performance makes actual rest impossible. Because rest now needs to be earned. You're not just resting, you're "practising self-care" or "recharging your batteries" or "investing in your mental health." Even rest becomes work. Even stillness requires a business case.

Rules worth breaking

Even in writing this series, i'm breaking rules. Academic writing operates by its own game logic: citation formats, argument structures, deference to dead white men who said it first. A whole multi-year long rite of passage and ritual run like an MLM. The real rules stay unspoken. Who you cite. How you perform intelligence. The delicate dance of agreeing just enough with your supervisor whilst pretending to think independently.

i remember trying to write about feeling, just feeling, and being told i needed a citation. My actual lived experience needed academic validation to count as knowledge. i spent hours hunting for someone with a PhD who'd felt what i felt, so i could footnote my own life.

This series? It's stitched from pieces of my Masters thesis. Reworded. Reshaped. Set free from academic acceptability. Rewritten because i wanted to, because it gave me pleasure, because the ideas deserved better than to die in a PDF no one would read.

There's no certificate waiting at the end. No external examiner - only you guys reading and maybe the ideas that live on the other end of where this may go.

And still, here it is. And i really hope it makes you think about your own life in some kind of way. Some kind of liberating way.

This too is play. This writing without institutional purpose, this thinking without assessment criteria. And in this play, i hope we can rediscover the type of imagination and joy required to set us free.

Joy as political action

As a thought exercise, i wonder what would happen if we all agreed to stop performing busyness. What if we chose to prioritise our friends and loves ones over our bosses? Or pay deep attention to who is getting the best of our time, our love, our bodies? And who benefits from our exhaustion?

This is where joy becomes political. Not the commodified joy of self-care Sundays or mindfulness apps. Not the joy that requires a wellness budget or a subscription paid for through the workplace benefit programme. But joy as what Audre Lorde called "a serious threat to the status quo." Joy that refuses to justify itself, that doesn't produce anything except more joy.

Lorde wrote: "The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings." She wasn't talking about sex, though that's part of it. She was talking about the capacity to feel deeply, to want deeply, to know viscerally what nourishes us and what depletes us. And she argued that systems of oppression require us to lose touch with that knowing. Because once you remember what genuine satisfaction feels like, you stop accepting counterfeits.

It's not just energy that exhaustion steals but the capacity to know what we actually want and need. What actually brings us alive. When you're tired enough, you'll take whatever's offered. You'll accept that doomscrolling counts as rest. That grinding counts as purpose. You'll accept this as some type of transitioning phase of hard work and faux productivity to get you some weekends of rest, or a holiday a year, instead of stopping to ask why it's all so little and why all that labour isn't radically transforming the world around us for the better.

Lorde understood that reclaiming the erotic, reclaiming our capacity to feel and want and know what nourishes us, is fundamentally a political act. It's how we recognise when we're being exploited. It's how we distinguish between work that enlivens us and work that drains us. It's how we remember that we're not machines designed for productivity but humans designed for connection and creativity.

The cult of productivity serves those at the top whilst grinding down those at the bottom. bell hooks wrote about how dominator culture requires the destruction of community, the severing of bonds, the atomisation of people into isolated units of production and consumption. Because connected people remember they have choices and are able to imagine together.

hooks argued that love, genuine love, requires time, attention and presence. All the things that exhaustion makes impossible. People who are too tired, won't show up for each other and won't build community. They won't care about collective thriving when they're anxious about survival. It's made all of us easier to exploit, easier to convince that there is no alternative.

Collective imagination is a threat to power. Individual burnout is a problem that can be solved with personal optimisation, better boundaries, more resilience, some kind of mantra of work-life balance. Billion-dollar wellness industries exist to sell us solutions to problems the system created. But collective recognition that the system itself is broken? That we're not failing at capitalism, capitalism is failing us? That's a different kind of recognition.

Emma Goldman famously said "if i can't dance, it's not my revolution." There's something crucial about that; the movements for liberation can't be built on the same logic of self-sacrifice and joylessness that oppression demands. That actually, joy is evidence of our aliveness, proof that we haven't been fully beaten down, a resource more dangerous than anger because it shows us what we're fighting for, not just what we're fighting against.

Goldman's anarchist circles in the early 1900s were criticised for holding dances, for laughing, for finding pleasure in each other's company. But Goldman recognised that joy, especially collective joy, was itself revolutionary. It demonstrated that another way of being was possible. It created spaces where people could experience what life might feel like without bosses, without hierarchy, without the constant grind. It was practice for the world they were trying to build.

So as a thought exercise, ask yourselves - what would happen when enough of us remember that joy, unmonetised and unapologetic, is how we keep imagination alive? What happens when we recognise that rest isn't selfishness but preparation? That play isn't childish but essential? That leisure isn't laziness but the space where we remember how to be human?

Maybe the answer isn't doing more, but doing differently. Maybe we start by making space for purposeless play, for prioritising our communities over our jobs, by resisting the urge to turn every spark into a side hustle, every curiosity into a career path. Maybe you'll think of ideas too, better ones than i can.

Because once we remember that joy is political, that it always has been, we stop asking whether play is productive, and start asking what it makes possible.

And the questions beget more questions. Like who benefits from our busyness. Whose rules are we following. Why are some of us are drowning whilst others are thriving. Who built the tank, who maintains it, and who profits from keeping us swimming in circles.

The exhaustion itself is not equally distributed. The cult of productivity doesn't grind everyone down the same way.

And that's where we need to look next. Not at the goldfish tank in general, but at who's swimming and who's drowning. Whose exhaustion gets valorised and whose gets ignored. At how the systems we've been describing don't just exploit everyone equally, they exploit some people's bodies, time, and labour to subsidise others' comfort.

The altar of exhaustion demands sacrifice. But it's time we asked: whose bodies are on the altar? And who's doing the sacrificing?

Next: #5 Utopia of Play: bodies on the altar

References

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Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bogost, I. (2016) Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
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Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Weber, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.