Collective burnout: what do we do?

It's not just that 2026 began with a bang, condensing into a few weeks all the informational intensity that used to be generated more gradually over an entire year. It's not just the frenetic pressure to which we are subjected by the second, and perhaps not final, term of the orange-clad man in the United States. Nor is it just the chaos of mobility in Catalonia, which will be studied in psychology departments as a case ofburnoutcollective, at the very least, and if they don't remedy the situation, it will end up pushing some commuter rail user to throw themselves down an embankment with the understandable and desperate objective of setting everything in motion—himself, the landslide, the retaining wall, and collective dignity forming a single, united protest.

Certainly, our level of collective traffic is remarkable, and for various reasons. But not everythingburnoutNeither all the daily frenzy nor all the wear and tear of materials stems from the immediate present. Beneath the vicissitudes of geopolitics and the Catalan identity runs another, subterranean unease, one that is felt more deeply within each of us and that has to do with the acceleration of life, with the feeling that we never quite manage to escape our cage for any significant length of time, that we cannot give our lives the human rhythm we desire. Umbral already said it decades ago when he wrote that we live waiting for the moment when everything will quiet down, and that that moment may never arrive. But we sense that it hasn't always been like this. And we already know that technology and the digital revolution have a lot to do with it, but we would like, if we had the time, to stop and read or listen to the wise people who can explain to us what on earth has happened to us.

This bittersweet pleasure is what I experienced on Monday at a lecture by the philologist and editor Raül Garrigasait. In a talk at the Palau Macaya, the Hellenist traced a historical arc explaining why, in the mindsets of ancient Greece, Christianity, and the Middle Ages, acceleration was meaningless and could not be understood as a value. Indeed, pre-modern ways of being in the world associated acceleration with imperfection and speed with an unnatural and diabolical force. And popular culture still bears its mark: the devil built his bridge in Martorell in a single night. But with modernity, all this began to change. For authors like Poe and Baudelaire, the aesthetic experience was meant to be an intense excitement, a fleeting intoxication. An electric shock. Time ceased to be understood as a cyclical or linear structure, becoming instead pointillist. If in the 19th century the drug of the elites was the lethargy of morphine, in the 21st century it is the repeated explosion of cocaine. And our attention, which had been contemplation, was transformed into something measurable, segmentable, and quantifiable during World War II, when psychology had to study the response of military personnel to the stimuli of war radars. The path toward the monetization of attention had been somewhat smoothed.

Perhaps this—a silent war, a frenetic yet gentle siege—is the intimate experience of so many people who complain about cell phones, email, not finding time to be themselves, not being able to do everything because technology makes us accessible at all times. Meanwhile, we continue waiting for the moment when we can interrupt the daily race, which we want to believe is provisional and temporary but which never quite reveals itself as such because we never stop running. Technology, says Garrigasait, is the material translation of the ideological framework of our time. Therefore, the ideological framework will have to change, and in this sense, it must be acknowledged that what is also accelerating is the disorganized but increasingly widespread operation to discredit social media, of which the ban on users under 16 would be a stage testing the path of stigmatization. And it will also be necessary to promote new forms of technology that allow for a morepremodernto connect with this world of ours, so fractured. It's no small feat, but we fight better in the company of wise people.