Why a satire on Electric Exhaustion should give us Digital Pause

In this episode from The Electric Life, we meet prematurely senile tycoon Adrien La Hèronnière who is confined to an “an artificial womb.” His illness? A lifestyle of over-electrification and debilitating exhaustion.

Satire can cut the deepest and stay with us, because its funny. Sort of.

Today at Ink & Time you’ll get:

• Passages and images from Robida’s iconic work, The Electric Life

• Reference links to screen time stats and professional burnout

• Feature story on how his troubling prediction is coming true in weird ways

• Preview of upcoming lost works featured on Ink & Time

In 1893 visionary author and illustrator Albert Robida imaged how technology would alter people in a speculative 1950’s Paris. It’s a classic of retro-futurism that was hugely popular in its day.

But Robida is now mostly unknown in the English-speaking world, with scant translated editions of his entertaining and incisive works. The literate anglosphere is poorer for it.

The Electric Life follows the tech-enabled romance of Georges and Estelle, a courtship sternly rejected by his scientific-industrialist tycoon father Philox Lorris. One of the many supporting characters, Adrien La Hèronnière represents the dark side of hyper-productivity, who while only aged 40, looks like he is 75.

He burnt himself out with constant electricity-fueled business endeavors.

In a perversely satirical turn of events, it is the laboratory-created Sulfatin who becomes his caretaker. Both of them accompany the lovestruck couple on their “engagement trip.”

Readers who appreciate an intellectually-robust sarcastic undertone, will enjoy the unfolding drama.

What are today’s equivalents? A blended work and leisure time, filled with back-to-back Zoom meetings, assaulted by Slack channels, struggling to keep pace with Claude chats, endless Netflix streams, and limitless plain old email…

Deeper Dive into Digital Exhaustion 2025

Screen addiction and professional exhaustion are widespread in advanced economies. Here are some references for those who want a deeper dive:

1. Magnet ABA Global Screen Time Analysis (2025)

   Peer-reviewed health technology journal: U.S. average: 7h4m/day vs. global 6h40m. Gen Z screen time: 9h/day (50%↑ since 2013). 41% of adults exceeding 9h/day show anxiety/depression symptoms.

   Average Screen Time Statistics

2. Techjury Global Digital Lifestyles Study (2025)

   Cross-national analysis of 35 economies: Philippines leads at 10h27m/day; U.S. ranks 12th (7h4m). 40% surge since remote work expansion.
   Screen Time by Country

3. Forbes: Job Burnout at 66% in 2025, New Study Shows

   Job burnout hits an all-time high of 66% of employees in 2025. Main stressors: 24% say too much work for available time. Gen Z shows mixed views on AI: 27% fear job replacement.
   Forbes Article

4. Harvard Business Review (2024) - "How Burnout Became Normal — and How to Push Back Against It"

   67% of adults aged 18-34 report stress affecting focus. 40% of Gen Z believe burnout is part of success.
   Harvard Business Review

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Tech as Panacea: Treating Symptoms instead of the Cause

Picture a billionaire sealed inside a climate-controlled capsule. Temperature, humidity, light, sound, all modulated by algorithms. Meals arrive in tubes or pills. A stern attendant wheels the patient around a manicured park until the gentle rocking sends him/her to sleep. Or maybe its a humanoid robot.

Sound like a “digital detox pod” for overstretched founders?

It’s actually a scene in The Electric Life where medico-engineer Sulfatin imprisons the fragile tycoon La Hèronnière in an incubator—“an artificial womb” fashioned to reverse the ravages of what the novelist calls electric exhaustion.

Remarkably, our contemporary infatuation with health retreats, mindfulness, personalized nutritional therapies and more were more or less already en vogue in the 1880’s. We think our struggle to adapt to digital technology is unique. But societies since the dawn of machines have been imperiled in similar ways.

La Hèronnière’s breakdown is a textbook description of what we euphemistically call a “mental health crisis.” Decades of “spreadsheets and calculations” invade his dreams while flickering financial televisors envelop him at every turn. Trade this Belle Epoque futuristic vision for 24/7 AI chats, and the pathology remains the same.

In 2019 the World Health Organization codified burn-out as an “occupational phenomenon” citing chronic workplace stress that is “not successfully managed.” (World Health Organization). A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that uncontrolled burn-out now drains US$4,000–21,000 per employee each year (HR News and Analysis | HR Dive).

La Hèronnière exemplifies what cognitive scientists now call task-switching cost: even asleep he “dreams of business in jolting bursts.” Modern neurology shows that every digital alert resets our attention, elevates cortisol and fragments restorative sleep—the very nightmare Robida lampooned a century before smartphones arrived.

The Infantilisation Cure: Nanny Tech in Action

Sulfatin’s prescription is brutal: regress the millionaire to infancy. Bottles replace banquets; a toy electric car substitutes for the chauffeur; ledgers are banned on pain of forfeiture.

The parody from 1893 anticipates what is now a flourishing industry:

• ReSTART, a Washington-state clinic, treats gaming and crypto-trading addiction with 45-day tech abstinence and nature immersion.

• “Dopamine-fast” camps confiscate phones and ration conversation to rescue founders from their own apps.

• Andean ayahuasca retreats promise a visionary restart for venture capitalists whose neural circuitry is fried by pitch decks.

Robida ridicules both disease and cure: after three years of incubation, La Hèronnière may work only in “small measured doses,” like an addict earning screen tokens. Today we explore the gamification of not using other apps. Satire has become a prescription.

At forty-five La Hèronnière resembles a skeleton “crushed by the ferocious gears” of modern life. Robida ties physical decay to relentless credential-chasing. A Victorian forerunner of LinkedIn badges and Coursera marathons.

Today’s metrics are no kinder. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 calculates that disengagement lopped $438 billion from the world economy in 2024 alone (Gallup.com). The broader fatigue problem is equally stark: the U.S. National Safety Council pegs productivity losses from worker fatigue at US $1,200–3,100 per employee each year (National Safety Council).

Modern start-up culture has glorified 100-hour work-weeks, then seeks to bankroll wellness pods that look like Sulfatin’s glass womb. Robida’s story is prescient.

Robida grasped that technology’s hidden hazard is totalisation: an infrastructure so pervasive that stepping outside it feels infantile. His incubation allegory uncovers another danger—the outsourcing of agency.

La Hèronnière cannot self-regulate; an engineer must meter his exposure to the very tools that made him rich. Our reliance on screen-time dashboards, focus modes and habit-tracking apps follows the same logic.

So the nineteenth-century novelist leaves a question for a blue-lit age: Will we master the electric life, or will it bottle-feed us until we forget how to chew?

Robida wrote The Electric Life as comedic exaggeration. Yet his diagnosis of “electric exhaustion” is defining digital native culture.

Is it mildly ironic? Darkly humorous? Or, cut too close to the bone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Ink & Time provides curated insights from lost or forgotten texts that were influential in their day, and distinctly relevant for us in 2025.