There’s a particular kind of tired running through the thoughtful people of this age.
Not sleep-tired.
Not burned-out tired.
Something deeper — the fatigue of minds built for depth but forced to live in a world that won’t sit still long enough to let them think.
You can see it everywhere if you know what to look for.
Colin’s piece brushes against it.
The workplaces feel it.
The culture feels it.
And anyone who still thinks with their whole mind carries it like extra weight in their coat pockets.
Let’s call this what it is.
This is the fatigue factor —
the exhaustion of thinkers living in systems designed for speed, noise, and constant interruption.
And it’s showing up the same way across the board.
1. The fatigue of being pulled in a hundred directions at once
Thinkers aren’t built for multitasking. They’re built for deep water.
But the modern world keeps tugging at their sleeves:
endless pings,
meetings that multiply,
deadlines that sprint,
expectations that scatter attention like gravel across the road.
So thinkers live with a quiet truth:
“I could do real work —
if the world would stop long enough for me to breathe.”
That tension alone wears a person down.
2. The fatigue of seeing problems clearly but having no structure to act
Most thinkers today are not confused — they’re contained.
They can see where things are breaking.
They can see why systems won’t hold.
They can see what the next decade will demand.
They can see how badly institutions are reading the room.
But there’s no framework to carry their clarity.
No common language to move their ideas through the world without distortion.
So the mind keeps running,
and the structure keeps lagging,
and the gap between them becomes its own form of exhaustion.
3. The fatigue of being asked to produce without being allowed to think
Every workplace wants innovation,
but none of them want to make space for thinking.
So the thinkers end up running two lives at once:
the one they’re paid for —
meetings, tasks, speed —
and the one that matters —
deep, slow, quiet work that never fits on the calendar.
It feels like mental jet lag that never ends.
4. The fatigue of carrying the moral weight alone
This one is quiet, but it’s heavy.
Most thinkers are the moral anchors in rooms drifting toward the rocks.
They’re the ones who notice
when numbers get twisted,
when incentives tilt the wrong direction,
when truth is sacrificed for speed.
They hold the line alone.
And that costs something.
It adds years to a person.
5. The fatigue of having no shared structure for clarity
This is the root of the whole problem.
Thinkers today are working alone in a fog —
each with their own pace, their own compass, their own method,
and no shared framework to keep the fog from creeping back in.
Thought without structure becomes fatigue.
Structure without truth becomes collapse.
Every serious mind right now lives between those two failing poles.
That’s why the Baseline exists —
not as another philosophy,
not as a motivational slogan,
but as the common language thinkers have been missing.
A clean framework for clarity.
A place to set the mind down and think straight again.
6. The fatigue of pretending everything is fine
Thinkers know we’re at an inflection point.
They can feel it.
Institutions wobbling.
AIs outrunning their guardrails.
Public trust thinning.
Work hollowing out.
Culture fraying at the edges.
And everywhere they go, someone says:
“Relax. It’s fine.”
But thinkers know better.
It’s not fine.
And carrying that awareness quietly is its own exhaustion.
7. The fatigue that comes before a shift
Here’s the good news —
this particular tiredness is the kind that comes right before change.
Thinkers don’t collapse when environments break.
They outgrow them.
The fatigue is the evidence.
It’s the mind saying:
“The old way doesn’t work anymore.”
Which is exactly why Colin’s piece hits.
It’s why more eyes keep landing on our work.
It’s why the Baseline’s traction keeps rising.
It’s why the evaluators keep returning.
Everyone who still thinks with a whole mind is feeling the same thing:
The world is asking us to think without a framework —
and the fatigue is the signal that we can’t do that anymore.
The Baseline didn’t show up early.
It showed up right on time —
at the exact moment when every real thinker finally whispers to themselves:
“I’m tired of thinking alone.”
And that’s when clarity begins.
The Faust Baseline has now been upgraded to Codex 2.3
The Faust Baseline Download Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Free copies end Jan.2nd 2026
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
All rights reserved. Unauthorized commercial use prohibited.
“The Faust Baseline™“
