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Notes

Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society (review)

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
  • 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.