I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In Twilight of the Idols (1888), Nietzsche critiqued Western philosophy, taking down Socratic rationalism and Christian values. He wrote the work in just over a week, in aphoristic style, with maxims presenting his philosophical ideas.
In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han takes up Nietzsche’s framing of the vita contemplativa, the contemplative way of life, offered in Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche wrote that one must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.”
Han explains:
Reacting immediately, yielding to every impulse, already amounts to illness and represents a symptom of exhaustion. Here Nietzsche is simply speaking of the need to revitalize the vita contemplativa. The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. As a mode of saying no, sovereign action [Tun] proves more active than any and all hyperactivity, which represents a symptom of mental exhaustion.
With social media, many people have lost this excluding instinct that allows them to say no to continued scrolling, reacting, and (occasionally or sometimes never) posting. They become hyperactive in searching out the dopamine hits of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter.
Han continues:
Without the “excluding instincts” Nietzsche praises, action scatters into restless hyperactive reaction and abreaction. In a pure state, activity only prolongs what is already available. In contrast a real turn to the Other presupposes the negativity of an interruption.
Han believes that the achievement society erases our ability to find the Other, what is different, what is novel, what is not-me. Meeting the Other is where we can put down our own “fat, relentless egos” (to use Iris Murdoch’s words) and become aware of something outside ourselves.
Without being able to pause, allow interruption to our nervous activity, we become like machines:
Activity that follows an unthinking, mechanical course is poor in interruption. Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation, the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay.
And as social media consuming machines, we respond only to machine logic, the algorithms designed to keep us scrolling and reacting endlessly.
The power not to do
To escape the burnout society, you have to have the power not to do something, not to keep scrolling, not to keep working at a bullshit job, not to keep acquiring needless things with the money you make at that bullshit job.
You need the power to say no. You need negative potency, to use Han’s phrasing. It is an essential trait of contemplation:
In Zen meditation, for example, one attempts to achieve the pure negativity of not-to—that is, the void—by freeing oneself from rushing, intrusive Something. Such meditation is an extremely active process; that is, it represents anything but passivity. the exercise seeks to attain a point of sovereignty within oneself, to be the middle. If one worked with positive potency, one would stand at the mercy of the object and be completely passive. Paradoxically, hyperactivity represents an extremely passive form of doing, which bars the possibility of free action. It is based on positive potency that has been made absolute to the exclusion of all else.
I think I should start meditating again, as a way of cultivating the excluding instinct that Nietzsche wrote of.