Film
No film tells us more about tech burnout than Jeff Orlowski’s polemic The Social Dilemma, which shows that it is not simply a sad occasional casualty of digital consumption or social media engagement. It is inevitable. The tech burns you out because you are the fuel that is destined to be used up: you are the log throwing itself on the flames that warm the tech corporations. Addiction is algorithmically baked into the way social media works; cunningly conceived with all its little beeps and prompts and come-ons to keep you scrolling, liking and retweeting, yearning for the next insidious little dopamine hit of amusement, jittery and uneasy if your smartphone isn’t immediately to hand. Thus we are all unwittingly enlisted into an army of consumers whose presence justifies these corporations’ ad spends. Peter Bradshaw
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Game
It may seem counterintuitive recommending a digital product to cope with tech burnout, but stick with us here. A Short Hike is a game about … a short hike. You play as a little bird who must wander to the top of a mountain in the luscious Hawk Peak Provincial Park in order to get a mobile phone signal. The woodland landscape is free for you to explore so you can find your own way, and you bump into other hikers and a few little secrets on the way. With beautiful pixel visuals, adorable characters and zero sense of peril, this is the most zen video game you could imagine – and it only takes a couple of hours to complete. When you get to the peak, you discover the reason for the journey, providing a final emotional hit. A game about the quiet joy of discovery, and a truly meditative experience. Keith Stuart
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Music
When my brain is frying like an ancient modem but there’s no end to work in sight, the only option is to sync mind to machine and whack on the Field’s 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime. Opener Over the Ice is a throbbing whirr of loops, minimal techno and ambient glow that’s just hard enough to spur you forward, but still sparing in its tenderness. I put it on so often that my response to hearing it is pretty much Pavlovian at this point: it may be time to work, but at least this sleek Swedish producer can reduce burnout to a glowing ember. Laura Snapes
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Book
“Secrets are lies”; “Sharing is caring”; “Privacy is theft”. The Circle, the eponymous tech giant in Dave Eggers’ novel, is good at generating mantras. The company has hoovered up the personal data of millions of citizens and monetised it all so effectively that working there seems like the ultimate dream for its young, ambitious staff. They put in long hours in front of multiple screens as endless “zings”, messages, queries, and invitations stream past. After work they are expected to socialise on the company campus and post everything about that on social media, too. Some thrive under the relentless pace and constant self-exposure. Some are crushed. When The Circle came out in 2013, some of its satire of the internet age seemed broad brush. Now that reality has proved itself darker and cruder than Eggers’ worst imaginings, this book instead feels like an unheeded warning: prescient, intelligent – and exhausting. Sam Jordison
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Television
In terms of artistic representation, you can lean into explorations of tech burnout. Or perhaps more healthily, you can simply celebrate life’s more tangible joys: friendship, nature, love, community and the physical world. For that, there is nothing more affirming than Mackenzie Crook’s sublime, deceptively profound sitcom Detectorists. Andy (Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) are not so much hiding from the imperatives of modern communication as bypassing them altogether. They find meaning in day-to-day beauty: sitting in a field, discussing last night’s telly with your best mate and just occasionally, finding a trinket that’s the key to another world. By slowing down, disengaging from the networked life and keeping one foot in the deep past, they manage to live in an eternal present, too. Phil Harrison
