For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance.
What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism.
With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover, at least not within hundreds of years. Draining the Glen Canyon Dam will not restore Glen Canyon; Church Rock will never be remediated. And the threats are endless and everywhere: 4,500 species are critically endangered right now, global warming is set for 3+ degrees Celsius, the Great Barrier Reef might die entirely.
Attacks on privacy aren't new, but they seem have changed. The Clipper Chip was a central, recognizable enemy, promoted by branches of the government citizens can relate to. 24 hour turnaround on surveillance legalization for intelligence agencies is part of a new and horrible political landscape. SOPA and PIPA were indirect attacks, part of a state-corporate partnership that lets each party do the things the other is barred from. And even those were too central and easy to oppose - now they're coming back piecemeal, in budget bills and trade agreements where they're harder to address.
And as with the environment, what's lost is lost. Repealing surveillance laws is rare and unsustainable. Fighting surveillance in open courts is impossible; fighting it in FISA courts is a Kafkaesque nightmare of secret evidence and lack of standing. Corporate data-gathering is unprovable, and user information breaches are irreversible. Stolen identities can't be changed or recaptured.
So yes: I'm tired. I'm tired, and it's not an accident, because we're on the wrong end of an asymmetric fight.