Those who imagine that life in the past was simpler, slower and better are wrong. The experience of exhaustion, and anxieties about exhaustion epidemics in the wider population, are not bound to a particular time and place. On the contrary: exhaustion and its effects have preoccupied thinkers since classical antiquity.
This statement is interesting in that it reminds me of what Baron argues in A Better Pencil when he says that everyone views the progression of technology as being the root of their problems. In the case of exhaustion, we all think that prior generations must have had it easier when really they were thinking the same thing about generations before them.