The Burnout Society

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Burnout, like P.T.S.D., moved from military to civilian life, as if everyone were, suddenly, suffering from battle fatigue. Since the late nineteen-seventies, the empirical study of burnout has been led by Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, she developed the field’s principal diagnostic tool, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the following year published “ Burnout: The Cost of Caring,” which brought her research to a popular readership. “Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind,” Maslach wrote then. She emphasized burnout in the “helping professions”: teaching, nursing, and social work—professions dominated by women who are almost always very poorly paid (people who, extending the military metaphor, are lately classed as frontline workers, alongside police, firefighters, and E.M.T.s). Taking care of vulnerable people and witnessing their anguish exacts an enormous toll and produces its own suffering. Naming that pain was meant to be a step toward alleviating it. But it hasn’t worked out that way, because the conditions of doing care work—the emotional drain, the hours, the thanklessness—have not gotten better. Q. How do you reconcile a society that tries to homogenize us with people’s growing desire to be different from others, to be in a certain way, unique? A. Human existence today is totally absorbed by activity. This makes it completely exploitable. Inactivity reappears in the capitalist system of domination as an incorporation of something external. It is called leisure time, and as it serves to recover from work, it remains linked to it. We need a policy of inactivity. This could serve to free up time from the obligations of production and make real leisure time possible. Here we see the final inversion of the object-subject relationship. If it was previously commonplace to believe that your material reality, your community, your economic status helped shape your identity, now this relationship is turned upside down. It’s you who determines your material reality and your economic status. The subject creates his own reality. In a system where the Same predominates, one can only speak of immune defense in a figural sense. Immunological defense always takes aim at the Other or the foreign in the strong sense. The Same does not lead to the formation of antibodies. In a system dominated by the Same, it is meaningless to strengthen defense mechanisms. We must distinguish between immunological and nonimmunological rejection. The latter concerns the too-much-of-the-Same, surplus positivity. Here negativity plays no role. Nor does such exclusion presume interior space. In contrast, immunological rejection occurs independent of the quantum, for it reacts to the negativity of the Other. The immunological subject, which possesses interiority, fights off the Other and excludes it, even when it is present in only the tiniest amount.

Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself." [9] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization. [10] There are several factors and dynamics that feed the burnout society. They’re as follows: Toxic positivism Q. Why, despite growing precarity and inequality, does the everyday world in Western countries seem so beautiful, hyper-designed and optimistic? Why doesn’t it seem like a dystopian or cyberpunk movie? Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023) ISBN 9781509546206

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A. Not exactly. The smart home of interconnected objects represents a digital prison. The smart bed with sensors extends surveillance even during sleep. Surveillance is increasingly and surreptitiously imposing itself on everyday life, as if it were just the convenient thing to do. Digital things are proving to be efficient informants that constantly monitor and control us.

Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken (Essay Collection). S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt 2014 ISBN 978-3100022035. Burnout syndrome has 2 dimensions. The first is exhaustion, the physical and mental drainage caused by rapid expenditure of energy. The second is that of alienation, feeling like the work you’re doing is meaningless and it doesn’t really belong to you. With the expansion of the system of production comes an ever-increasing narrowness of functions to be filled by workers.

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Q. According to the philosopher Fredric Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Can you picture some form of post-capitalism, now that it seems to be in decline? The basis of all of the above is the underlying idea that we’re free and that it’s up to us to seek personal fulfillment. After all, we’ve been told that we can be anything we want to be and nothing is beyond our reach. For the same reason, we set unrealistic standards for ourselves and push ourselves to the absolute limits to meet them. Brazilian Portuguese edition: Hegel e o Poder: Um ensaio sobre amabilidade, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2022 ISBN 9786557134214. Call for Papers: The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto

To show how we are building this society of tiredness, Han launches his argument from the basis of our achievement society. In 2022, it is hard for any worker to know if they have the value Joe had to his employer. Good workers can be let go with little warning, if management’s favor turns against them. The system that gives esteem to engaged employees also creates anxiety only quelled through working more intensively. The cure is also the poison. To calm our anxiety, we work too much without adequate reward, without autonomy, without fairness, without human connections, and in conflict with our values. We become exhausted, cynical, and ineffective. Q. Depression is one of the most alarming health problems we are facing today. How does this “absence of world” operate?What is uncanny about Covid-19 is that those who catch it suffer from extreme tiredness and fatigue. The illness seems to simulate fundamental tiredness. And there are more and more reports of patients who have recovered but are continuing to suffer severe long-term symptoms, one of which is “chronic fatigue syndrome.” The expression “the batteries no longer charge” describes it very well. Those affected are no longer able to work and perform. They have to exert themselves just to pour a glass of water. When walking, they have to make frequent stops to catch their breath. They feel like the living dead. One patient reports: “It actually feels as if the mobile were only 4 percent charged, and you really only have 4 percent for the whole day, and it cannot be recharged.” Handke preaches the need to return to a more conscious tiredness that unites and cures those who experience it. According to him, this is possible by re-evaluating the contemplative life devoted to not doing. Evading the pressing call of the world, renewing the barriers that delimit the ego does not mean being less free but more authentic. 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] Depression 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. Alain Ehrenberg locates depression in the transition from disciplinary society to achievement society: