"The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity. I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026."
"She masters a new skill, and it's deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and gets no response. She lands a new job, and the job is dissolved. The dark core of the story of Sisyphus is not that his toil is repetitive or even that it's eternal. It's that the work is erased as soon as it's done."
"Change fatigue is just that: fatigue. This has been studied, quite extensively, by psychologists. A 2024 long-term study of more than 50,000 workers in Germany found that organizational changes-like reorgs, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergers-are linked to things like sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression, and that the more changes an individual undergoes, the more likely they are to have these symptoms."
Modern employment often subjects workers to continual cycles of change: learned skills become obsolete, software switches, bosses and organizational structures shift, applications go unanswered, and positions vanish. That cycle mirrors the mythic punishment of performing work that is immediately undone, creating a sense of labor without lasting accomplishment. Such persistent change generates change fatigue, which manifests as sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression. A long-term 2024 study of over 50,000 German workers found that reorganizations, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergers correlate with these symptoms, and that increased exposure to change raises the likelihood of adverse health outcomes.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]