The Burnout Society

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Brazilian Portuguese edition: O desaparecimento dos rituais, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2021 ISBN 9786557132487.

The “corona blues” is the name the Koreans have given to the depression that is spreading during the pandemic. Under quarantine conditions, without social interaction, depression deepens. Depression is the real pandemic. The Burnout Society set out from the following diagnosis:Han is the author of more than twenty books, the most well known are treatises on what he terms a "society of tiredness" ( Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), a "society of transparency" ( Transparenzgesellschaft), and the concept of shanzhai (山寨), a style of imitative variation, whose roots are, he argues, intrinsic to Chinese culture, undermine the distinction often drawn between original and fake, and pre-exist practices which in Western philosophy are called deconstructive. Juan David Almeyda Sarmiento: Hacia una ética del jardín. Estudios filosóficos sobre el pensamiento de Byung-Chul Han. Editorial Universidad Industrial de Santander. 2023. ISBN 978-958-5188-64-8

Brazilian Portuguese edition: Filosofia do zen-budismo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2020 ISBN 9788532662361.

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Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023) ISBN 9781509546206 The Protestant ethic, Weber argues, derives from the theology of John Calvin, the sixteenth century Christian reformer noted for his doctrine of predestination, which means God chooses, or “elects”, some people for salvation, with the rest destined for eternal death. Only God knows who has been chosen and who hasn’t, but humans understandably want to find out.

Work anxiety is built into capitalism. That’s a key premise in Max Weber’s 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , which still perfectly captures the mindset that sustains our work ethic today. Weber shows how European Protestants created a mode of thinking about money, work and dignity that we, to this day, cannot escape. It is our “iron cage”. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I might just end there – you see, after all that philosophising, I’m suddenly feeling very, very tired … Play more and work less: A visit with Byung-Chul Han in Karlsruhe". Sign and Sight. 2011-07-25 . Retrieved 2012-06-09.Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019) ISBN 0262537508 Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London & New York: Verso Books, 2017) ISBN 9781784785772 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?” We have had to live in the society of “Yes, you can”, a society that affirms that we can all go as far as we can just trying. We live in an era in which Positive Psychology has become popular and distorted, limited to a series of motivating phrases without much substance that convey a clear message: “You can!”.

Q. French writer and mathematician Blaise Pascal said that: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We live in a cult of productivity, even during what we call “free” time. You named it, with great success, the burnout society. Should the recovery of our own time be set as a political objective? The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination [Herrschaftsinstanz] forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience-subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.3 Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it. The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom.

Notes

In the present context, it is not surprising that we are witnessing another curious phenomenon: the emergence of what can be called self-referential optimism. This is a widespread, almost religious belief that you have to be optimistic all the time. This optimistic attitude isn’t grounded into something real or actual, but only in itself. You should be optimistic not because you actually have something concrete to look forward to but just for the sake of it. In Agonie des Eros ('Agony of the Eros') Han carries forward thoughts developed in his earlier books The Burnout Society ( German: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) and Transparency Society ( German: Transparenzgesellschaft). Beginning with an analysis of the " Other" Han develops an interrogation of desire and love between human beings. Partly based on Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, where Han sees depression and overcoming depicted, Han further develops his thesis of a contemporary society that is increasingly dominated by narcissism and self-reference. Han's diagnosis extends even to the point of the loss of desire, the disappearance of the ability to devote to the "Other", the stranger, the non-self. At this point, subjects come to revolve exclusively around themselves, unable to build relationships. Even love and sexuality are permeated by this social change: sex and pornography, exhibition/voyeurism and re/presentation, are displacing love, eroticism, and desire from the public eye. The abundance of positivity and self-reference leads to a loss of confrontation. Thinking, Han states, is based on the "untreaded", on the desire for something that one does not yet understand. It is connected to a high degree with Eros, so the "agony of the Eros" is also an "agony of thought". Not everything must be understood and "liked", not everything must be made available. [11] In recent decades, there has been a steady rise in the popularity of self-help books and a new glorification of ‘hustle’ culture. Working a 9-5 job is no longer enough, you need multiple income streams and a ‘side hustle’. We also see the growing influence of the gig economy, with giants like Uber or DoorDash, which signals the demise of the old Fordist model of work, where a worker could show up regularly to his 9-5 job for forty years straight. Prioritize silence and rest in your daily routine. Stop perceiving these spaces as something negative, On the contrary, understand that boredom and reflection are necessary for creativity and well-being to flourish. Answer. There is without a doubt a hyperinflation of objects, meaning they are everywhere. However, these are disposable objects that we cannot really bond with. Today we are obsessed not with things, but with information and data, that is to say, non-things. Today we are all infomaniacs. We even have the concept of datasexuals [people who obsessively collect and share information about their personal lives].