The Burnout Society
Ratings19
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings19
Average rating3.5
Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.
Reviews with the most likes.
We are living in a time of excess. We are “achievement-subjects” — multi-tasking, productivity maximizing, hustle culture entrepreneurs of the self. Even our leisure is commoditized - pretty picks of vacation destinations or fancy meals offered up for numeric judgement in the form of clicks and likes. Self-care is only in service of returning refreshed, getting back to the grind so that you can be more, better, richer. We are in the midst of Performance Society, there is no limit to our potential and so burnout is inevitable in the face of constant striving. Depression is our inability to measure up, becoming tired of having to become ourselves. We need to admit the idleness that benefits the creative process. We need to be bored and be able to contemplate.
This picks up the thread from Byng-Chul Han's earlier work The Scent of Time and in my head gets mixed up with the recently read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. This one proved a bit more of a slog but coming in under 80 pages one can hardly complain. I've always got time for a bit of anti-capitalist philosophical thought.
