Byung-Chul Han for the Exhausted
The philosopher of burnout, read on behalf of a city that schedules its own exhaustion.
His books are thin enough to read on a commute, which is either a mercy or a trap, because each one is designed to ruin a comfortable idea you were living inside. Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher, has spent two decades writing short knives, and the most famous of them, The Burnout Society, makes one cut: nobody is doing this to you anymore. You are doing it to yourself, and calling it freedom.
The argument runs like this. The old world disciplined people with walls, bosses and the word no. That world has largely dissolved, replaced by an achievement society whose only command is yes you can. It feels like liberation and functions like a more efficient factory, because the master and the worker are now the same person, and that person never clocks out. Depression and burnout, in Han’s reading, are not personal failures. They are the industrial injuries of self-exploitation, the exhaustion of a soul that has volunteered for everything.
Any resident of this city will recognise the crime scene. The side hustle on top of the job on top of the personal brand. The rest day spent optimising rest. The vocabulary of the gulag, grinding, crushing it, applied voluntarily to one’s own weekend. Han’s coldest observation is that the achievement society does not need to censor anyone: excess positivity does the silencing, because a person busy performing wellness has no time left to ask what any of it is for.
His prescriptions sound almost embarrassingly gentle, which is the point. Contemplation, ritual, the courage to be bored, the recovery of what another of his titles calls The Scent of Time: duration, lingering, time that is not being spent on anything. A house named for fragrance and memory could not ask for a friendlier philosopher. Perfume is Han’s argument worn on skin: it cannot be skimmed, multitasked or consumed at 2x speed. It can only be lingered in, which achievement society regards as waste and Han regards as the whole of a life.
How to read him: one book, not five, because his style loops and one dose is a course of treatment. Start with The Burnout Society on a slow evening, ideally in a dim room, phone elsewhere. He sits in the house’s Index for the same reason he sits in this journal: not because he is fashionable, which he unfortunately is, but because he is the rare philosopher whose advice can be followed tonight, by simply not doing something, on purpose, and noticing how it smells.