Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society: Our Only Imperative is to Achieve
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/byung-chul-han-burnout-society-our-only-imperative-is-to-achieve/
- a cult of individual achievement has led to mass burnout and depression across society
- KF: Review Asimov’s (1980) A Cult of Ignorance
- an ‘imperative to achieve’
- We are no longer the “obedience-subjects” of disciplinary society, Han claims, but the “achievement-subjects” of achievement society.
- One way this changes comes out is that depression, rather than oppression, is now the sickness of the age.
Hyperattention
- Hyperattention, Han tells us, is characterized by “a rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes”, where perception becomes “fragmented and scattered.”
Self-exploitation.
- In achievement-society, we are the ‘entrepreneurs’ of ourselves, and exploit ourselves in the name of productivity and achievement
- Burnout, which often precedes depression, does not point to a sovereign individual who has come to lack the power to be the ‘master of himself.’ Rather, burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation.
Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation [i.e. external-exploitation] because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it.
The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient. The capitalist system is switching from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation in order to accelerate.