In a world where exhaustion is worn as a badge of honour, what happens when your body demands a break?
Erica Smith
As a soon-to-be graduate, I used to measure my worth in deadlines met, applications sent, and interviews survived. The answer, for many chronically ill entry-level job seekers, is precarity, invisibility, and the creeping sense that we were never meant to survive the grind in the first place.
The graduate job market is dire, with current competition levels at an all-time high. The process of securing a junior position feels like chasing a one-in-a-thousand opportunity, and reports highlight graduates sending hundreds of applications and interview success rates as low as 10%. The vast majority of us have undertaken unpaid or underpaid internships, reinforcing the notion that “paying your dues” is an unavoidable rite of passage. Downwardly mobile graduates are forced into a cycle of relentless self-sacrifice, where gratitude is expected for scraps. A standard of perpetual low-reward overextension has bled into the very fabric of job-seeking culture, where hustle is king and rest is a weakness.
For graduates like me facing the double burden of joblessness and chronic illness or disability, the outlook is bleak. The pressure to keep slogging away becomes unbearable, with worries about inadequate access to necessary adjustments combining with uncertainty about keeping up with the ever increasing demands of full-time work. The barriers faced by the rising number of disabled job seekers who remain unsuccessful in their search are well-documented, yet current policy discussions remain fixated on proposed reductions to government funding for employment schemes. The toll of constant rejection only compounds this strain.
Making this even more frustrating is a distinct irony: the very health struggles that make job-seeking difficult for many of us are often related to the unsustainable, hyper-productive culture that we enter as soon as we leave higher education. The pressure to maintain exhausting working hours is directly linked to rising levels of depression and numerous other long-term illnesses.
How hustle culture makes us ill
A chronic overachiever, my own burnout began at 16. From the moment I realised my future hinged on accumulating credentials, every grade, every extracurricular, every carefully planned step felt less like personal growth, and more like a desperate attempt to stay afloat. Stress clung to me more stubbornly than it did my peers – no small feat in the well-heeled suburbs of the world’s most famous university town – but I treated it as a personal quirk, not a warning sign.
When I first developed a dizzying constellation of physical symptoms in my final year of university, I struggled to accept neurological diagnoses from countless specialists. It took a relapse, months of unmedicated misery, and a specialist who challenged my denial before I finally accepted the diagnosis of a complex migraine variant, unsurprisingly exacerbated by stress, anxiety, and the long-term neglect of my symptoms.
The research was all there: the link between neuroticism and migrainous nervous system dysfunction; how chronic pain is thought to stem from faulty neurological filters, and how it disproportionately targets those with comorbid anxiety and depression. My mental health wasn’t the sole culprit, but it was a key player, creating the perfect storm in which an opportunistic condition could spiral out of control. This wasn’t just a personal failing or an unfortunate roadblock, it was an indictment of the exact culture of “pushing through” I’d spent my life internalising.
With the invisible and fluctuating symptoms that characterise chronic illness, many of us struggle with the fact that our impairments don’t align with popular or legislative interpretations of ill-health. But the need to survive as a productive economic citizen persists. The expectations linger, the pressure to conform remains, and the questions of when I’ll resume my industrious, self-sufficient ways keep coming. Turns out, the system doesn’t care how many gold stars you collect along the way – it will still chew you up and spit you out, asking, all the while, why you aren’t grinding harder.
Now, after having trudged through my Master’s degree while desperately unwell – convinced I could outwork my own body – the reality is stark. I tell people I’ll be well enough to commit to an intensive job search in earnest soon, but the truth is, I don’t really know when that will happen. How do you take even an unspecialised temporary job when you don’t know if you’ll wake up able to see, walk, or think straight?
Rest as resistance
So, how do we navigate a world that rewards unremitting exertion but punishes the very bodies it demands so much from? Rest is the answer – and in a system designed to bleed us dry, it is nothing short of radical. As author and activist Evie Muir argues in Radical Rest, when productivity defines worth, choosing to slow down is an act of resistance.
I won’t pretend my own version of this is anything close to revolutionary; I’ve had the privilege of navigating all this with a safety net that’s allowed me to maintain my dignity and independence. But even from this position of relative security, the guilt of simply stopping is deeply ingrained. Embracing rest as a necessary refusal has been one of the only ways I’ve found peace with it, accepting the fluctuations in my mood and condition as an intrinsic part of the lost art of convalescence.
This unintended trial of endurance hasn’t just been a personal reckoning, it’s situated in a wider rebuke of a system that treats young workers as disposable. The graduate job market tells us to keep pushing past our exhaustion. But what if we didn’t have to keep going at this pace? As a contributor to Muir’s book argues, when our nervous systems start sending us red flags, the first step toward change is learning to listen to them. Rest shouldn’t be radical, it should be a right. Our generation deserves a future free from capitalist guilt and the constant fear of falling behind.
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