The Burnout Society

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Romanian edition: Agonia erosului, Humanitas, ISBN 978-973-50-4326-1, EPUB/PDF ISBN 978-973-50-4466-4. In the sixth chapter, Byung-Chul Han makes a pathological analysis of the tale I brought here, Bartleby's The Scrivener: The Wall Street Story, by Heman Melville to illustrate the history of exhaustion. By looking at these others we deem to be perfect in terms of the productivity and success we ask of ourselves but don’t achieve, we feel extremely inferior and frustrated. In effect, we mentally punish ourselves for not living up to these results. Apparent freedom Harm does not come from negativity alone, but also from positivity—not just from the Other or the foreign, but also from the Same. Such violence of positivity is clearly what Baudrillard has in mind when he writes, “He who lives by the Same shall die by the Same.” 4 Likewise, Baudrillard speaks of the “obesity of all current systems” of information, communication, and production. Fat does not provoke an immune reaction. However—and herein lies the weakness of his theory—Baudrillard pictures the totalitarianism of the Same from an immunological standpoint:

Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken (Essay Collection). S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt 2014 ISBN 978-3100022035.The dialectic of Being-Active, which escapes Arendt, is that the hyperactive intensification of activity turns this into a Hyper-Passivity, in which we helplessly follow every impulse and stimulus. Instead of freedom, it brings forth new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that the more active we become, the freer we are. By combining quotations from great philosophers and elements of popular culture, Han’s latest book Undinge (or Nonobjects), which is yet to be published in English, analyzes our “burnout society,” in which we live exhausted and depressed by the unavoidable demands of existence. He has also considered new forms of entertainment and “psychopolitics,” where citizens surrender meekly to the seduction of the system, along with the disappearance of eroticism, which Han blames on current trends for narcissism and exhibitionism. Heidegger’s thinking also displays immunological traits. Thus, he decidedly rejects the Identical, to which he opposes the Same. In contrast to the Identical, the Same possesses interiority, which is the basis for every immunoreaction.

Yet this full freedom produces in the individual the anxiety of having to exploit his condition as a free man and the consequent sense of guilt when he lingers. In a nutshell: it makes him anything but happy. Psychologist Barry Schwartz explains this paradox in his book The Paradox of Choice and summarizes it in the eponymous 2005 TED Talk. The failure of animal laboransDepression is also a symptom of the burnout society. The achievement subject suffers burnout at the moment it is no longer able “to be able.” It fails to meet its self-imposed demand to achieve. No longer being able “to be able” leads to destructive self-recrimination and auto-aggression. The achievement subject wages a war against itself and perishes in it. Victory in this war against oneself is called burnout. Freudenberger died in 1999 at the age of seventy-three. His obituary in the Times noted, “He worked 14 or 15 hours a day, six days a week, until three weeks before his death.” He had run himself ragged. The Burnout Society is a fascinating little book, short and well-structured, with its seven brief sections skilfully linked, drawing the reader carefully through the writer’s argument. In a blunt manner (typical of both Germans and Koreans), he reveals the true nature of modern life, using an interesting expression to label us: Prácticas de la amabilidad: una interpretación del pensamiento de Byung-Chul Han. Areté. Revista de Filosofía, 34(2), 2022, pp. 291-318. ISSN 1016-913X

The street term spread. To be a burnout in the nineteen-seventies, as anyone who went to high school in those years remembers, was to be the kind of kid who skipped class to smoke pot behind the parking lot. Meanwhile, Freudenberger extended the notion of “staff burnout” to staffs of all sorts. His papers, at the University of Akron, include a folder each on burnout among attorneys, child-care workers, dentists, librarians, medical professionals, ministers, middle-class women, nurses, parents, pharmacists, police and the military, secretaries, social workers, athletes, teachers, veterinarians. Everywhere he looked, Freudenberger found burnouts. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Neil Young sang, in 1978, at a time when Freudenberger was popularizing the idea in interviews and preparing the first of his co-written self-help books. In “ Burn-out: The High Cost of High Achievement,” in 1980, he extended the metaphor to the entire United States. “ WHY, AS A NATION, DO WE SEEM, BOTH COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY, TO BE IN THE THROES OF A FAST-SPREADING PHENOMENON—BURN-OUT?” Gute Unterhaltung. Eine Dekonstruktion der abendländischen Passionsgeschichte. Verlag Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2007. The point of view in Han is that Bartleby is someone who has not yet come across depression because it is not moved by the quest to be itself. It only performs monotonous activities, which leave no room for any initiative. Overwork is not his mark so much is that at the end of the tale comes the revelation that he was employed in the card industry, a kind of archive.A. We need information to be silenced. Otherwise, our brains will explode. Today we perceive the world through information. That’s how we lose the experience of being present. We are increasingly disconnected from the world. We are losing the world. The world is more than information, and the screen is a poor representation of the world. We revolve in a circle around ourselves. The smartphone contributes decisively to this poor perception of the world. A fundamental symptom of depression is the absence of the world. English edition: The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) ISBN 1509542760.