What does ‘politics’ look like in a contemporary moment defined by crisis and collapse? Conventional politics is predicated on a willful subject overcoming conditions and commanding power through active resistance. The stance and practices of many contemporary workers do not qualify as ‘political’ in this framework. Rather than dismissing this position as ‘passive’ or ‘uncritical’, this article carefully parses its potential. I draw on worker stories, social science, media and cultural studies, and philosophical insights to conceptualize this politics of exhaustion, identifying its foundations, aims, and activities. The politics of exhaustion is premised on waiting rather than acting, enduring rather than resisting, ambivalence rather than ‘criticality,’ and the object rather than the subject. This alternative form of politics is quieter and smaller, a power that looks like powerlessness. Such a schema contributes to our scholarly understanding but also aims to be taken up by the the exhausted as a map of politics in the present.