“Are you exhausted today?” political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks over video chat on a dark Friday afternoon. This is a question he is posing not just to me, but to you, too – and it’s one he already knows the answer to. Most of us, the indicators suggest, would suggest we are. But Chaudhary argues this isn’t just an individual problem: “Our ecological life is exhausting, our social and economic lives are exhausting, even our individual lives are exhausting.”
This is one of the central arguments of his first book The Exhausted of the Earth: how you feel and the state of the world are connected. And, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Your exhaustion is not some random byproduct […] There is a class of people out there who cause your exhaustion, [and] it’s not just Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.” Under capitalism, we are not all in it together.
