Farah is currently sitting 45 miles away, staring at a screen that feels just as mechanical and twice as broken. It is 11:35 p.m., a time of night when the house is so silent you can hear the hum of the refrigerator in the next room. She isn’t working late because she has a mountain of data to process or a 125-page report to finish. She is working late because her manager sent an email at 5:05 p.m. with the subject line “Quick Thought” that contradicted everything discussed in the 95-minute meeting they had that morning.

Farah is paralyzed. Not by the workload, but by the incoherence of it. Every request on her screen currently sounds equally important, yet they are fundamentally incompatible. It is the digital equivalent of being told to drive north and south at the exact same time. The exhaustion she feels isn’t in her muscles; it’s a heavy, grey silt settling in the back of her skull. We often call this burnout, but that word has become a catch-all for “too much to do.” What Farah is experiencing is something more corrosive. She is quitting the confusion.

Human beings are remarkably resilient when it comes to effort. We can climb mountains, endure 15-day treks through the wilderness, and stay up for 25 hours straight to finish a project we believe in. There is a specific kind of satisfaction in being “good tired”-the feeling of having expended every ounce of energy toward a clear, tangible goal. But there is no satisfaction in “fog tired.” Fog tired is what happens when you spend your entire day trying to decode the hidden meanings in a Slack channel where 45 people are talking at once, none of them saying anything definitive.

Human beings can endure effort more easily than incoherence.

I realized this myself recently while I was organizing my digital files by color. I spent 85 minutes meticulously tagging folders in shades of cerulean and ochre, convinced that if the aesthetic was perfect, the chaos of my workload would somehow resolve itself. It was a mistake. I was treating a structural problem with a paint job. I ended up losing 15 important documents because I had categorized them by how they made me “feel” rather than what they actually contained. I was adding my own layer of ambiguity to an already blurry situation. I think I did it because I wanted to feel in control of something, even if that something was just the hexadecimal code of a folder icon.

We see this in institutions everywhere. They mistake exhaustion for commitment and volume for value. They assume that if their employees are online for 105 hours a week, they must be getting 105 hours of work done. In reality, about 45% of that time is spent navigating the thicket of poorly defined expectations. When a company lacks a clear “North Star,” every individual becomes their own compass, and they all point in slightly different directions. The result is a massive amount of kinetic energy that results in zero net movement.

Zoe R.J. knows that in her world, 5 grams of pressure can be the difference between a high-end textile and a pile of rags. In the corporate world, the equivalent of that pressure is clarity. Without it, the “tension” of the organization snaps. People don’t leave because they are tired of working; they leave because they are tired of wondering if their work even matters. They are tired of the 5th revision of a slide deck that no one will ever see. They are tired of the 15th “check-in” call that doesn’t actually check anything.

When you remove the “why” and the “how,” all that’s left is the “what,” and the “what” is usually just a list of tasks that feel like they were generated by a broken algorithm. This is the hidden cognitive strain that destroys retention. We are witnessing a mass exodus from the nonsensical. People are looking for places where the friction is productive, not performative. They want to be part of systems that respect their cognitive bandwidth. This is why structures like ems89 matter; they act as the tension calibrators for the digital age, stripping away the noise until only the signal remains. When the interface of our lives is calm and trustworthy, we can actually focus on the work itself rather than the struggle to understand it.

I often think about the 85-year-old clockmaker I met once in a small town in the Alps. He worked 15 hours a day, his eyes magnified by thick lenses, his hands steady as he manipulated gears the size of a grain of sand. He wasn’t burnt out. He was energized. Why? Because the physics of a clock are absolute. If he placed a gear correctly, the clock ticked. There was no ambiguity. No one was going to come by at 5:15 p.m. and tell him that actually, the clock should be a toaster. He had the luxury of a clear reality.

In our modern “knowledge economy,” we have abandoned that clarity. We have traded the physics of the clock for the politics of the “vibe.” We ask people to be “agile,” which is often just a polite way of saying “be ready to change direction at 5:25 p.m. because we haven’t decided where we’re going.” This agility is an expensive luxury. It costs us the mental health of our most dedicated people. It costs us the 95% of our potential that is currently being diverted into “alignment meetings” and “synergy workshops.”

I remember a specific mistake I made a few years ago. I was leading a small team and I thought the best way to keep everyone happy was to be “flexible.” I didn’t set hard deadlines, and I didn’t define specific roles because I wanted everyone to feel “empowered” to contribute everywhere. Within 25 days, the team was in shambles. Not because they were lazy, but because they were terrified of stepping on each other’s toes. They spent 75% of their time talking about who was doing what, and 25% of their time actually doing it. I had created a vacuum of leadership, and the vacuum was filled with anxiety. I realized then that clarity is a form of kindness. By being vague, I was actually being cruel.

Zoe R.J. doesn’t have the option to be vague. If she is vague, the loom breaks. If the loom breaks, 15 people lose their shift pay. There is a brutal honesty in mechanical work that we should strive to replicate in our digital spaces. We need to stop pretending that ambiguity is a byproduct of “fast-paced environments.” It isn’t. It’s a byproduct of lazy thinking. It’s the result of leaders who are afraid to make a choice, so they ask their teams to keep all 5 doors open at once.

If you find yourself staring at your screen at 11:35 p.m., like Farah, ask yourself a question: Am I tired because of the work, or am I tired because I don’t know what the work is? If it’s the latter, no amount of vacation time or “wellness stipends” will fix it. You can’t recover from a lack of meaning by taking 5 days off to sit in a dark room. You recover by finding a place where the tension is calibrated, where the goals are visible, and where the 55th email of the day actually has a point.

We are entering an era where the most valuable commodity isn’t information-it’s the absence of noise. The institutions that survive will be the ones that can offer their people a sanctuary of coherence. They will be the ones that understand that a human brain can handle 105% of its capacity if the path is clear, but will shut down at 35% if the path is obscured by a thick, unnecessary fog.

What if the reason you’re tired isn’t the work you did, but the work you couldn’t find a reason to do?