Some types of fatigue are resistant to the standard treatments. Not exactly sleep, but sleep does help. Not a vacation, though some people attempt that as well. It’s the weariness that comes from optimizing every aspect of your life, including your schedule, diet, morning routine, and career path, only to feel utterly depleted beneath it all. An increasing number of individuals in their twenties and thirties are coming here and, rather surprisingly, reaching for novels.
Not self-help books. not frameworks for productivity. books. The kind that lacks lessons in bullet points, a five-step morning routine, and practical takeaways. Just fictional characters navigating fictional lives with fictional issues in settings that only require the reader’s attention. As it happens, that’s exactly the point.
In her 2020 book, Anne Helen Petersen captured the essence of this burnout, contending that a whole generation had been brought up to view themselves as human capital—constantly performing and optimizing, unable to stop even when it was time to do so. In response, the billion-dollar and expanding self-help sector created more content specifically targeted at this issue. More guidelines to relax. Additional recovery frameworks. More tips on how to be less tired, presented in formats that are difficult to read. It has an almost darkly humorous quality. The person who is burned out picks up a book about burnout and puts it on their list of things to do.
Fiction completely avoids this. The novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, which tells the story of a young woman in early 2000s Manhattan who drugs herself into almost constant sleep as a radical withdrawal from a life she can no longer sustain, doesn’t ask readers to do anything. They are being asked to spend a few hours inhabiting someone else’s fatigue. The experience is both familiar enough to be reassuring and far enough away to be secure. Psychologists who use bibliotherapy have observed that this combination is really helpful. It’s a form of emotional permission to feel what you’ve been feeling without trying to change it right away when you see your own inner life reflected in a fictional character.
It is worthwhile to comprehend the neuroscience of this. The prefrontal cortex, the analytical portion of the brain that is already depleting its reserves in a knowledge-work economy that never fully clocks off, is activated by complex narratives. Immersion, character-driven fiction, on the other hand, stimulates empathy and memory rather than analysis by activating the limbic system. In actuality, reading a novel is a cognitive mode switch. After ten hours of processing spreadsheets, Slack notifications, and performance reviews, the mind completely switches gears. This brings about real relief. It can be measured.
Using this material, Ling Ma’s Severance accomplished something intriguing: it completely literalized the metaphor of burnout. In the book, a pandemic virus known as Shen Fever turns its victims into zombies who go through the motions of their former lives without any inner life left, compulsively repeating familiar routines until they pass away. Readers quickly realized that it was a satire of hustle culture. People who had scoffed at the thought of themselves, still responding to emails at midnight, technically alive and functioning, found the book to have a sizable readership. In this sense, fiction does not provide answers. It provides acknowledgment. Furthermore, acknowledgment may seem like the first sincere thing someone has said to you in months during a protracted period of exhaustion.
It’s still unclear if this shift toward fiction as a form of healing is a true cultural shift or just a fleeting response to the unique pressures of the last ten years that will subside once those pressures subside. As it develops, there’s a feeling that something more lasting might be taking place. Under the guise of bibliotherapy, therapists have been recommending particular novels to patients for decades; what is currently changing is not so much the practice as it is the cultural acceptance of it. It used to be necessary to justify reading a novel: you’d earned it, you’d finished your work, or you had a free afternoon. More and more people are viewing it as a need rather than an incentive. Something more akin to upkeep than indulgence.
The authors who have attracted the biggest readership from burned-out readers typically have one thing in common: they don’t provide closure. The ambivalence of Sally Rooney’s characters remains unresolved. The narrator of Moshfegh does not come out of it changed. The resolutions are candid, ambiguous, and open about the continuous challenges of being human. It turns out that one of the things tired readers most need from a book is that refusal to neatly tie everything together. Not the assurance that things will improve. Just the companionship of someone who is aware of how difficult it is, written in a way that makes the difficulty seem completely tolerable—at least for a few hours.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.