The Burnout Society
Metadata
- Author: Byung-Chul Han
Highlights
In the contemplative state, one steps outside oneself, so to speak, and immerses oneself in the surroundings. — location: 230
The general denarrativization of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare laboring corresponds entirely to bare life. — location: 283
Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you”—that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze. — location: 327
Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you”—that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze. — location: 327
Reacting immediately, yielding to every impulse, already amounts to illness and represents a symptom of exhaustion. — location: 332
Reacting immediately, yielding to every impulse, already amounts to illness and represents a symptom of exhaustion. — location: 332
One needs to learn to see, to think, and to speak and write. — location: 326
vita contemplativa — location: 325
Without the “excluding instincts” Nietzsche praises, action scatters into restless, hyperactive reaction and abreaction. — location: 339
Activity that follows an unthinking, mechanical course is poor in interruption. Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation, the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay. — location: 347
Paradoxically, hyperactivity represents an extremely passive form of doing, which bars the possibility of free action. It is based on positive potency that has been made absolute to the exclusion of all else. — location: 384
The wall is always associated with death. — location: 402
He does not develop symptoms of depression, which is a hallmark of late-modern achievement society. Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby’s emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. — location: 405
He does not develop symptoms of depression, which is a hallmark of late-modern achievement society. Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby’s emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. — location: 405
The wall is always associated with death. — location: 402
The dialectic of freedom means developing new constraints. — location: 589
In contrast, the process of repression or negation plays no role in contemporary psychic maladies such as depression, burnout, and ADHD. Instead, they indicate an excess of positivity, that is, not negation so much as the inability to say no; they do not point to not-being-allowed-to-do-anything [Nicht-Dürfen], but to being-able-to-do-everything [Alles-Können]. — location: 637
In contrast, the process of repression or negation plays no role in contemporary psychic maladies such as depression, burnout, and ADHD. Instead, they indicate an excess of positivity, that is, not negation so much as the inability to say no; they do not point to not-being-allowed-to-do-anything [Nicht-Dürfen], but to being-able-to-do-everything [Alles-Können]. — location: 637
The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints. Psychic maladies such as burnout and depression, the exemplary maladies of the twenty-first century, all display auto-aggressive traits. — location: 743
The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life.30 It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity. It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health. — location: 800
The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life.30 It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity. It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health. — location: 800
Their life equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die, and too dead to live. — location: 814
Their life equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die, and too dead to live. — location: 814