THE BURN-OUT SOCIETY - BYUNG-CHUL HAN

     I read this one in a day since I’ve been tackling a handful of other, very long, though very good books and I needed something different. I’ve been aware of Byung-Chul Han for a while, he’s a Korean-German philosopher that people seem to really like, but I hadn’t read any of his books and was only vaguely aware of their content. This 50 page little tome was certainly different that I was expecting. It’s very pithy, almost aphoristic; it gets in and out of the ideas it’s interested in. Han is focused here on why so many people are burned out, depressed and/or suffer from ADHD. He posits that after the Cold War, we’ve gone from the sort of discipline/control society, so well described by Foucault, to an “achievement society” where people are motivated by an internal sense of drive. “They are entrepreneurs of themselves,” as he puts it. To Han, we’ve gone from the hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks and factories (the emblematic institutions of the discipline society) to fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls and genetic laboratories of this achievement society. This book reminded me a lot of “Coming Up Short” from a few years ago which is about how the current economic conditions have lead to young people being forced into creating a narrative about overcoming w/r/t their lives since the typical symbols of adulthood and “making it” like a house and steady income and a job and family are increasingly hard to come by. Han is showing how such a system is internalized, especially when one doesn’t make it, and how this failure to achieve creates what we call burn-out. I think he’s right on about how some segments of our society have so deeply taken to heart the achievement narrative that they auto-exploit until they burn-out. We can see this in both the ever-popular “you’re-your-own-entrepreneur,-go-out-there-and-get-it” narrative as well as the self-care industrial complex that has sprung up to deal with the psychological fallout of this way of living. I think Han is also right that this represents an acceleration of capitalism. I rarely say this about a book, but this could have been longer. I think Han is really onto something, I’ve seen and experienced burn-out in my personal life and have noticed that it seems to be increasing, both in frequency and in terms of how much it’s part of the general discourse. 50 burned-out people