Contemporary Man in the Burnout Society (feat. Byung-Chul Hahn)

A quest for meaning in a hollow existence

Last week, I mentioned our society’s obsession with work and its failures as a transcendent or immanent meaning making structure. After Nietzsche’s “God is dead” and the displacement of theology as the center of all human endeavors (be they moral, social or even political), our search for meaning in an otherwise absurd existence has been completely deconstructed.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about Michel Foucault’s “orthopedics of power”, i.e., the institutions used to maintain power structures and order in a capitalist society: prisons, psychiatric hospitals and schools. The latter, schools, are built in order to forge assets capable of being inserted into the production system and optimize their contribution to growth and development. It’s a highly industrialized system where people are reduced to numbers (your GPA), ranked and oriented towards the outlets best suited to extract as much benefit from the person as possible. It’s a pretty neat, quasi-scientific approach responsible for the incredible boost in production and bettering of living conditions for millions of people. However, everything comes at a cost.

Foucault’s approach is based on coercion and punishment. The French thinker posits otherness as an element of society’s panopticon: a surveillance state where everyone is more or less explicitly pushed towards the actions demanded by production-oriented capitalism. If you decide to go to clown school instead of engineering school, you’ll feel social punishment through the scorn and jokes made by our panopticon peers, who judge us and reinforce society’s institutional structures through language and action.

Enter my favorite current rock & roll star philosopher: South Korean Byung-Chul Hahn. In his book, “The Burnout Society”, Hahn will take Foucault’s implications further and update them for the internet era (this will hopefully create a nice framework for my ideas on transcendence through work, which we’ll tackle shortly).

Byung-Chul Hahn argues that Foucault’s punishment and criminalization society doesn’t work nowadays. We’re living in an open, interconnected society where freedom is paramount. Everyone has the technological tools to do whatever they want, be it make music, movies, write books, create startups, work from home, etc. Hahn’s question then becomes: why do we see soaring rates of depression and anxiety?

He defines “depression” as a state of impoverished attachment to the environment, the creation of a fragmentary life where meaning dwindles away. Our post-capitalist end-of-history society puts enormous pressure on individuals to “become oneself” and “achieve” something in life. Since any notion of external transcendence (i.e. through the worship of a deity) is in decline after Nietzsche’s “death of God” predicament, contemporary Man turns inward in our search for meaning and significance. However, since time has been transformed into a unit of measurement and optimization, every second you’re not advancing in the quest to “become yourself” or achieve your goals, is a second of extra pressure leading to anxiety.

What do I mean? I mean that the rational transformation of society we went through in modernity: the use of mathematics, logic and science to understand the world, has percolated into all aspects of society. “Bureaucracy” for example, is an attempt to transform public institutions into the most optimized and efficient structure possible (see Max Weber for more). Through the reduction of people to mere numbers -that little slip of paper you’re handed when you go to the DMV-, order and maximization of time prevail (or should). The maximum number of people are tended to in the minimum amount of time.

You can obviously see how this has extended to almost all aspects of society, which are based on the same optimization principle. However, when we reduce people to numbers, when we make all human exchanges go through technology, there is something fundamental about ourselves that is lost. This becomes clear when we see how “time” has changed as a concept.

Time used to be an idea tied to sacred notions and the cosmos. The “end of time” was represented as “judgment day” and your interactions with the sacred evolved on a different sphere. This is to say, when people had revelations and felt they were talking to God, this experience was sub specie aeternitatis: outside of time and closer to the person than what he experienced in his daily life. Ecstatic experiences, epiphanies and visions remain closer to the subject than anything he may experience afterwards.

Is it coincidental that in a world that has shunned the transcendent and replaced it with some form of naïve pantheism (when not outright radical naturalistic materialism: we die and the chemistry is over. El fin), the need for shamanic experiences is on the rise? Isn’t the psychedelic revolution we are living, an answer to a hollowed-out, rationalized and optimized life? (We’ll get back to this notion in further posts).

Byung-Chul Hahn goes down this line of thinking timidly in his book, mentioning the contrast between the vita activa, or active life, versus the vita contemplativa, or contemplation. The “Burnout Society” has substituted Foucault’s surveillance state with a paradoxical state of “freedom” where we post all our lives to the net and force ourselves to chase “achievement”. There is no ultimate goal (no transcendence): life has become a series of “goals” to “achieve”, get a happy dopamine rush out of it, and then move on to the next goal. Even worse, the atomization of work and society make many of these “goals” micro-achievements that are almost impossible to share. Nobody talks about his KPIs at the bar.

Vita activa has overun everything, transforming people into busybodies rushing about to “achieve their goals”. The old vita contemplativa where time is understood as evolving on a different plane of existence has been restricted to meditation retreats, monks and the quick fix of psychedelics removed from their original shamanic rituals and ceremonies.

Byung-Chul Hahn has a solution: he thinks we need to go back to the basics, back to the earth, back to nature. Start a garden. Get into carving wood. Put time into homemade cooking, for the pleasure of it. Find your space for vita contemplativa, read a book, listen to medicine music. I tend to agree that this approach, even though it’s a half-baked solution, seems to be one of the escape routes to a Burnout Society that makes us oppress ourselves, chase ever fleeting “goals” to “achieve” an escape from the terrifying question: Who are you really?

We’ll be talking about this more on upcoming posts.

Let me know if this is all highfalutin’ stuff, or too basic and boring… Thanks for taking the TIME to read this. Give it a think and don’t hesitate to comment below ;-)