It started with Covid, but it did not stop there. What began as an emergency gradually turned into a background condition, something that spread into work, relationships, attention, and sleep. In much of the Western world, it lost the shape of an exception and became part of everyday life.
One of my privileges is that I talk to people every day. Lawyers, managers, students, consultants. But also cab drivers, cashiers, baristas, and people whose work rarely appears in conference slides or professional bios. Conversations often begin the same way. “How do you feel?” The answer hardly changes.
“I’m in survival mode.”
The wording shifts, the meaning does not. Some say they feel underwater. Others describe it as living under constant bombardment. Different images pointing to the same experience: moving through uncertainty, pressure, and noise without ever leaving a state of alert.
This is often interpreted as a motivation problem or a lack of resilience. It is neither. What we are facing is a capacity problem. Human systems were never designed to remain permanently activated. Continuous information flow, uncertainty, and low-level anxiety slowly exhaust the nervous system, long before motivation disappears.
A friend once described it as sitting in a hospital waiting room, knowing that something important is going to happen, but having no idea when. Another compared it to the final stage of a pregnancy, when everything feels painful, but at the same time heavy, inevitable, and suspended. Despite the difference in the metaphors, the tension is quite similar. A prolonged state of waiting, without resolution.
This is where many people seem to be stuck. Waiting for a big event.
Sometimes that event is external. A promotion, a market shift, a political change, a new boss, the end of a crisis, something that reorganizes life from the outside. Sometimes it is internal. A moment of clarity, motivation returning, energy reappearing, the feeling that things will finally fall back into place. In both cases, life is paused until something decisive arrives.
Survival mode feeds on this kind of waiting.
Think about it. A system that needs constant stimulants and urgencies to keep going is already under strain. If extraordinary effort becomes the baseline, coffee replaces rest, and deadlines take the place of structure, the issue is no longer commitment or ambition. It is the way the system has been shaped.
The signals are easy to recognize, even if we have learned to ignore them. Feeling tired after seven hours of sleep. Being exhausted and still unable to rest. Weekends that fail to restore anything. Focus that only appears under extreme pressure. The need for external forces to accelerate and other external forces to slow down. All these are expressions of overload. And it doesn’t take a Zen master to notice that this kind of living is not a sustainable operating mode.
In my experience, waiting for the right event, internal or external, tends to extend the damage rather than resolve it. What helps is movement, even minimal. A small step in the right direction. A boundary introduced. A constraint removed. A priority clarified. Something that gently shifts the system, without waiting for everything to change at once.
A sentence from Proverbs which I find really meaningful says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Look around you. Many hearts are already under strain. Maybe yours as well. Stepping out of waiting, slowly and imperfectly, is often the first and most effective way forward. It is in movement, not in postponement, that hope begins to recover its strength.
