4 February 2026
Overwhelming physical labor destroys the human body. The consequences of hard physical work are visually apparent. When we say that someone “overexerted themselves,” we are referring to ultrasound, MRI, or X-ray images that reveal physical injuries - strains, tears, fractures, hernias.
Overwhelming mental labor similarly damages the human central nervous system. Yet the consequences of intense mental work are exponentially harder to detect, even for medical professionals. You cannot shine a beam of X-rays into the human psyche and see burnout. You cannot press on a sore spot if it has no clear location in the body.
We are limited in our observational tools, and therefore we cannot treat mental illnesses as effectively as physical ones. There are specialists in occupational health and safety, but how capable are they of preventing accidents related to mental injuries? Their toolkit is still focused on the body, not the mind.
In a post-industrial world, where the overwhelming majority of people engage in mental rather than physical labor, we continue to apply industrial safety standards. As a result, intellectual exhaustion, burnout, and psychological injuries are perceived as personal failures rather than systemic risks.
In the 20th century, the physical exploitation of workers was curtailed, with the consequences enshrined in labor law. Yet mental exploitation in the 21st century is still not constrained by legal norms. The occupational safety standards of the industrial society have become a Procrustean bed for the intellectuals of the digital age - they equate physical and mental labor without regard for the fundamental difference between them.
Today, mental illnesses surpass physical ones in both scale and impact. The epidemic of depression has replaced the infectious disease epidemics of the past. Yet the difference is fundamental. Humanity knows how to contain and localize the Spanish flu, but when it comes to depression, we still do not know how to stop its spread.
The reason is that depression has no infectious agent. The source of mental illness is the environment in which a person lives and works. And if this is so, then the only “vaccine” can be nothing less than a redesign of the environment itself.
Therefore, we urgently need a new culture of intellectual labor - a culture that acknowledges the limits of a person’s cognitive and emotional resources, just as we once acknowledged the limits of their physical endurance. Until such a culture is established, mental injuries will remain invisible - and therefore permissible.