Many Italian proverbs extol the virtues of fatigue. In fact, it is said, “Glory is not achieved without fatigue” or “he who flees fatigue, flees fortune” and again “fatigue is the mother of knowledge”. And yet, human beings, as is natural, flee tiredness and anxiety whenever they can. They look for solutions to lighten the weight they have to carry, perhaps by resorting to technology. Only to then perhaps discover that immersed in their futuristic devices they struggle even more to keep up with the rhythms of stress.
Starting from considerations like this, the historian and sociologist Georges Vigarello in his Storia della sforza (il Saggiatore, 2024, euro 35.00, pp. 528) leads us in an exploration of tiredness through the ages and cultures. He offers us, in fact, a narrative in which the changes in our socio-working structures intersect with those concerning bodies and self-perception, the impact of war and the birth and evolution of sports activity.
We start with medieval fatigue, in which to distinguish the noble fatigue of the warrior and the pilgrim from the "ignoble" fatigue of the medieval worker bent over digging the farmer's land". Obvious symptoms of fatigue were dehydration, loss of humors and liquids. How to intervene? Drinks with strange recipes to rehydrate, talismans and spices. Then Vigarello moves on to the modern age: fatigue was inserted into categories. Bureaucratized as the modern State was bureaucratized, made up of officials and administrators. In this framework where everything was categorized and hierarchized, the fatigue of the tax collector was worth more than that of a convict. These were the years in which people began to fear the effects of fatigue on the body, a fatigue that deformed, that made you age prematurely. These were the years in which people began to talk about training for fatigue and resorted to essences and tonics such as tobacco and coffee.
In the Enlightenment universe of the eighteenth century, fatigue was rationally monitored. It was no longer the moods or dehydration that showed contemporaries fatigue, but the nervous response. Tiredness became the fruit of poorly managed nervous excitement, weakness was due to continuous tensions that weakened to the point of leading to hysteria. To resolve everything, people resorted to tonics of all kinds and to hardening themselves with resistance practices such as exposing themselves to the cold of the harshest winter.
The industrial age was the age of toil to produce more, to achieve a goal. The logic that prevailed was that of performance that could not be missed. In those nineteenth-century times it was believed that human beings were born with a fire inside, an energy that fatigue thinned. People then resorted to tonics, offered by the innovations of chemistry, and to drugs, but they also began to consider the importance of nutrition to reduce tiredness.
Finally, the current era, that of workaholism, burnout, mental fatigue that often replaces physical fatigue. It is the age, ours, of resorting to psychological therapies, meditation and listening to oneself to alleviate stress, psychosomatic discomfort and burnout.
Alternating written testimonies with other archive documents, The History of Fatigue delves into the many ways in which the symbols and symptoms of fatigue have changed from century to century, arriving up to the present day, to an exhaustion that has multiplied uncontrollably, moving from the body to the mind and from work life to domestic-family life. What Georges Vigarello seems to suggest to us is that only by placing what is happening today in a process of historical transformations will we be able to understand ourselves better and get to the point where fatigue is indeed a constant to live with, but above all something that can be managed and controlled.