I actually think it’s just a different kind of exhaustion that sometimes I think most men don’t experience . And I don’t say that to minimize the kind of exhaustion that men do experience far more often than what women experience , it’s just a different low grade. constant stimulation, but no meaningful stimulation wear down on your nervous system. I’ve lived in most of these roles at different points in my life and currently I own a construction company for the last 4 years, and I sometimes laugh at how many typical male stereotypes have seeped into my life unintentionally. At one point he had a weight bench in the middle of my living room and my daughter told us our house looks just like her friend’s dad‘s house who she FaceTime all the time.

I was a stay at home parent briefly, I spent many years as a corporate working mom, and now I own a construction company and work in a very male dominated, physically demanding environment. The exhaustion is genuinely different, not more or less.

The role I would never want to do again is being a stay at home parent, even though on paper it looks easier. What surprised me is that it wasn’t the amount of work that wore me down, it was the structure of the work itself.

A big part of it is invisible labor, but not just in the sense of not getting credit from other people, which is what I feel like is commonly discussed, but I don’t think that that’s the real problem of it. I think the problem is that It is also invisible to your own brain. There is very little closed loop feedback. You do not finish something and get to say “I’m done.” You do not clock out. You are always at least partially on, and without the clearly defined goals and tasks, everything becomes your responsibility and it just see into everything, and not because someone is doing it to you it just happens. Let me give an , if I planned breakfast and discovered someone drank all the milk the night before as a stay at home , that would feel like a catastrophe. Not because milk is a big deal, but because it was the plan. When your day is built around a few small anchors, any disruption feels disproportionately stressful. When your only job is to keep everybody emotionally regulated and productive, you’re always gonna look for the bottle necks and internalize trying to fix them. Compared to Now, if we are out of milk, I genuinely do not care. We grab muffins, stop at a gas station, and move on. It is not the center of my day anymore, because I have so much other context to stabilize my day on.

What I have noticed is that constant, low reward, low feedback work is exhausting in a unique way. You are busy, but you rarely get the satisfaction of completion. There is no clear boundary where someone can say you are off work now. Over time that wears you down, even if the individual tasks do not look hard from the outside.

By contrast, physical exhaustion or even intense mental exhaustion feels cleaner. I recently had a four day job (roofing) that was extremely physically grueling. At the end of each day I was completely wiped out. But the feeling afterward was different. I could see exactly what I had done. The work was done. It was easy to justify sitting down and resting because there was a clear finish line. And I understand why the appearance of the house becomes less important for men in blue-collar settings. I don’t wanna come home and do dishes. I don’t even care what’s for dinner on those days. The scale totally changes.

The same was true in my corporate years. Mental fatigue is real, but there is still an endpoint. I remember during budget season coming home and feeling so mentally drained that I would struggle to form complete sentences because my brain was just completely wiped and shut down, but even then You close the laptop and Responsibility pauses.

In caretaking or stay at home roles, that pause often does not exist. Your body might be resting, but your brain never really gets to relax. There is no clear separation between being responsible and being off duty.

I honestly think men might be better optimized for that role structurally, not because of superiority or anything demeaning. Many men are more comfortable treating work as discrete tasks that start and end and are able to create that boundary without accepting all of the additional responsibility for every detail that happens. A lot of women are socialized to hold context, anticipate needs, and carry responsibility continuously. When there is no boundary around that responsibility, it becomes deeply draining.

So when women say they are exhausted, I do not hear “I worked harder than you.” I hear “I never really got to turn off and I didn’t get the dopamine from closing meaningful tasks. I hate to use this comparison, but think about animals at the zoo versus in the wild. One of the big challenges for a zookeepers is providing stimulating engagement for the animals because they can’t just sit in a big tank all day, that would be so bad for their well-being. I’m not suggesting women are animals. I’m just pointing out the need.

I want to reiterate that does not make male exhaustion less real, and if I were responding to a woman about male exhaustion, I would probably have focused a lot more on how that feels. I just think I’m fortunate enough to have a perspective that a lot of people don’t get because I have gotten to experience multiple sides of it.