I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Yesterday, I discovered a rich vein of philosophical thought when I discovered then read philosopher Byung-Hul Han’s The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010, sometimes translated as The Achievement Society). Han suggests that in late modern times, we have all become self-focused narcissists, concerned primarily with driving ourselves towards achievement in the world. By achievement, he means being endlessly productive, efficient, healthy, attractive and socially visible.
We receive messages from our culture like “Yes, you can!” and “Always be improving” and “No limits.” The message is “you are free to do and be anything you want,” but once that message is fully integrated into your psyche, you are not free. You now have within yourself an inner manager who is constantly telling you to do and be better: Go to the gym! Improve your website! Finish your book manuscript! You become an “entrepreneur of yourself” who can never rest. You are master and slave in one. And you must enact this all within an environment of 100% positivity.
I myself have participated in promoting this vision for the world. I think of the writing I’ve done about Tracy Goss’ The Last Word on Power, which suggests you come up with impossible goals, or Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Turning Pro, both of which provide many ideas for succeeding achieving as an artist (but don’t, despite Han’s suggestion, speak in terms of 100% positivity).
I think of how ambition leads to achievement leads to the ability to performance affluence, and I feel stuck trying to climb that ladder over and over again. I set my goals (ambition) and I work towards them (achievement) so that I can then acquire things (affluence).
What is the way out? Han sketches one possible way in The Burnout Society—the vita contemplativa, or the contemplative life, set in contrast to the vita activa of constant productivity. In later works he also offered additional suggestions, many of which are based on his theory that one of the most important things that lost in the achievement society is experience of the Other. Every person becomes a reflection of the Same, all individually striving for achievement markers of modern life. And, as we all focus more on our own self-improvement and achievement, we only pay attention to our individual selves. The Other no longer attracts or even appears to us.
In The Agony of Eros, Han writes that love in modern times is in grave danger (it is in agony), because achievement subjects cannot set down their focus on their selves and experience the Other. Experiencing the Other would require self negation and even self obliteration before a new self could develop (in a kind of Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis).
In other books, ChatGPT tells me, Han went further with this idea that in the achievement society all we experience is the Same (ourselves striving for achievement over and over again, other people doing the same) when what we need is an experience of the Other. How can we do that? Through language and storytelling, friendship and hospitality, art and literature. In art, through his essay Saving Beauty, he critiques the cult of smoothness and positivity in contemporary aesthetics (think of Jeff Koons’ balloon dog or the Apple iPhone). Instead, he calls for an aesthetics of the sublime, the broken, and the resistant, art that challenges instead of just soothing. He says art should unsettle the self by presenting something that can’t just be merely consumed.
I’m excited to dig deeper into Han’s thought as well as some other strands of philosophy that help retrieve meaning when the culture of achievement and affluence dominates.