{"id":18235,"date":"2026-03-15T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T15:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=18235"},"modified":"2026-03-14T08:24:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T16:24:41","slug":"l1-the-human-energy-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/15\/l1-the-human-energy-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson One: The Human Energy Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I\u2019m excited to announce a new course I have coming out next week, Everyday Energy<\/a>. It is a three-month program designed to help you build new practices into your life to feel more energetic and complete meaningful work. This course builds on the topics I\u2019ve been writing about over the past few months. It\u2019s not just a deep dive into the research, but transforms those insights into doable changes that make sustainable improvements to your energy levels.<\/em><\/p>\n

Registration opens on Monday, March 23rd. In the meantime, I\u2019m sharing a brief essay series that discusses the problem of energy, and samples from the Everyday Energy curriculum (fuel, flow and flourish).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Human Energy Crisis<\/h2>\n

We\u2019re living through a human energy crisis. One in three people report<\/a> feeling fatigue. One in eight report<\/a> feeling tired most days or every day. At our jobs, 76% of people feel burnout<\/a> at least some of the time, with nearly a third feeling burned out \u201cvery often\u201d or \u201calways.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In some ways, our exhaustion is paradoxical. As a society, we\u2019re richer than we\u2019ve ever been. The amount of labor needed to get enough food to survive is far less than at almost any point in history. We\u2019re saturated with entertainment and new leisure activities. And, for most of us, the physical effort needed to do our jobs is at an all-time low.<\/p>\n

Describe our lives to almost any human being plucked from history, and they would imagine a life of ease and convenience: machines that wash our clothes and dishes, water that flows from pipes in our homes rather than being hauled from rivers or wells, desk jobs, and food delivered to our doors\u2014ready to eat.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s evidence that all these modern luxuries haven\u2019t left us brimming with extra energy. Researcher Robert Hockey, author of The Psychology of Fatigue<\/a>, even argues that the notion of fatigue itself, the unpleasant experience of feeling drained, is an invention of the modern age; people in past societies felt tired after work, certainly, but they didn\u2019t have our modern problems of burnout and exhaustion.<\/p>\n

Instead, we have trends of pervasive fatigue and burnout, rising incidences of energy-related mental health issues like depression and ADHD, and increases in our consumption of coffee<\/a> and energy drinks<\/a>\u2014these all point to something deeply wrong with how we manage our energy.<\/p>\n

Why Are We Exhausted?<\/h2>\n

This crisis of energy has three root causes:<\/p>\n

First, our modern lifestyle puts heavy burdens on our biology<\/strong>. Indoor lighting and always-on entertainment disrupt our sleep. Sedentary habits undermine our health and fitness. Poor diets leave us simultaneously overfed and undernourished. Chronic psychological stress drains our bodies and our minds.<\/p>\n

Second, our work culture is unnatural and unhealthy<\/strong>. For most of human history, work was governed by natural rhythms of effort and recovery. Hunter-gatherers had to work hard to survive, but they also got plenty of rest<\/a> throughout the day. Before electricity, work ended when the sun set. Even medieval peasants likely got more days off<\/a> than we do.<\/p>\n

Third, social trends have robbed our work of much of the meaning it once had<\/strong>. Few premodern people had \u201cdream\u201d jobs, but they didn\u2019t have \u201cbullshit<\/a>\u201d jobs either. Work, even hard labor, fit into an understanding of the world that meant it could fill psychological needs. Divorced from that understanding, we oscillate between an unhealthy obsession with work and escape fantasies of perfect dream jobs or early retirement.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

These three forces mean that, despite lives of material abundance and apparent ease, many of us feel exhausted and apathetic.<\/p>\n

Energy Management is Key to Productivity and Well-Being<\/h2>\n

The forces that leave us exhausted and drained are much larger than we are. And nostalgia for a simpler time is a daydream, not a solution.<\/p>\n

Even so, we can cultivate practices that restore the prior, more humane, ways to manage our energy.<\/p>\n

In the face of a world designed to drain our biological sources of energy, we can create new fuel.<\/strong> We can cultivate deliberate practices of sleep, exercise, consumption and stress-management to restore our full capacity to live with energy and vigor.<\/p>\n

In the face of unrelenting pressure to work more, longer and harder, we can design a new flow.<\/strong> We can craft rhythms of work and recovery that allow us to avoid exhaustion\u2014while actually getting more done.<\/p>\n

In the face of unsatisfying jobs divorced from meaning, we can create work that allows us to flourish.<\/strong> Neither a burden nor an obsession, we can choose work with greater meaning, and we can also cultivate an attitude that enriches the work we have already chosen.<\/p>\n

These are not easy aims, and the overall cultural trends certainly do not help. But these aims are achievable, provided we take them seriously.<\/p>\n

Next week, I\u2019m going to begin working with a cohort of students for my new program, Everyday Energy<\/a>. If you\u2019re serious about improving the quality your energy in your life, both for work and for well-being, I hope you\u2019ll consider joining us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m excited to announce a new course I have coming out next week, Everyday Energy. It is a three-month program designed to help you build new practices into your life to feel more energetic and complete meaningful work. This course builds on the topics I\u2019ve been writing about over the past few months. It\u2019s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18235","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-development","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLesson One: The Human Energy Crisis - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/15\/l1-the-human-energy-crisis\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lesson One: The Human Energy Crisis - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m excited to announce a new course I have coming out next week, Everyday Energy. 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