Burned out and going nowhere: the American worker is too mentally drained to even look for a new job

The résumé sits unfinished in a Google Doc. The Linked In tab stays open, untouched. For millions of American workers, the search for something better has ground to a halt — not because the jobs aren’t there, but because they’ve done the math. The door, it turns out, is barely open. More than half of U.S. workers — 53%, according to a new Glassdoor poll of over 1,300 professionals — say they have paused their job search entirely to protect their mental health. It’s a figure that captures something economists rarely quantify: the exhaustion tax. The psychic cost of a labor market that demands constant hustle while delivering, for many, almost nothing in return. The door is closed from both sides The structural backdrop helps explain why. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave the condition a name last September: the “low-hire, low-fire” economy. The St. Louis Fed has since quantified it: as of late 2025, the hiring rate had fallen to 3.3% — just 0.5 percentage points above the all-time low recorded during the depths of the Great Recession in June 2009. The firing rate, meanwhile, sat at a historically low 1.1%. Workers aren’t stupid. They know that there’s nowhere to go right now. The quits rate — the single best proxy for worker confidence in labor mobility — dropped to 1.9% in late 2025, tying cycle lows. Americans now believe they have only a roughly 45% chance of finding a new role within three months — a figure lower than during the peak of the COVID pandemic in December 2020, per Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. Most U.S. CEOs had no plans to increase headcount in 2026, cementing the low-hire environment as a deliberate corporate posture rather than a cyclical dip. Monthly job growth now averages roughly 50,000–100,000 — well below the 150,000–200,000 range considered healthy. The rational math of burnout Compounding the immobility: job seekers are being ghosted at a three-year high, with more than half of applic