Burnout Addiction

Meanwhile, a full day without a clear agenda became paralyzing. What do I do with so much time on my hands? Time no longer passes: it has to be calculated and planned and exploited to the very second—a return to the Aristotelian notion of time as the measure of change. But not just any change. A change in perspective is trivial until it is executed as action. The change-maker is a doer. Change must be expressed in some visible, quantifiable form—the form of productivity. Life becomes an incessant process of self-reproduction. We lose our foothold on our existence the minute we stop making ourselves anew.

Byung-Chul Han, a contemporary South Korean-born philosopher, wrote in his 2015 work The Burnout Society that, “Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories.” For him, the contemporary society “has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.” 

There’s a limit to Han’s view of society: there are still many places where the surveillant power of madhouses and prisons marks their social organization. But we, a stratum of the 21st-century subject who have been gifted the opportunity to be what we want, have become victims of a novel kind of violence. It is the violence of positivity. It is no longer the formidable “should” that dictates what we do. We don’t fill our schedules because someone is pointing a gun at our heads. We do so because we can. 

The turn from Foucault’s disciplinary society to Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society did not happen with a simple negation of the former. It is accompanied by a paradigm shift from should to can, from the negative violence of confinement to the positive violence of empowerment. 

This seems to be the most utopian stage humans can reach: the unlimited freedom to self-realize. Yet, somehow, we end up locked in, burnt out, and drowned in a constant state of crisis. As it turns out, the positive freedom of the can, when pushed to the extreme, becomes the violence of benign extermination. Burnout is not an ailment in the negative sense. It is the antithesis of negativity, a surplus of positivity. It is a performance indicator that says, “you have maxed out your physical capacity.” It’s like the ever-so-slightly melted plastic smell from your laptop when you’re running fifty programs at the same time. It’s both a warning and a reward: warning in the sense that there’s no more that can possibly be done; reward in the sense that you’ve exploited yourself to the fullest. 

This is addiction. We drive ourselves into burnout because the very feeling of exhaustion and suffocation affirms our state of being a performance machine. 

And the best machine we know is the computer. The computer takes on inordinate quantities of data and executes its programs seamlessly. Many argue that machine intelligence will never trump human intelligence because humans have a will of their own, while the machine is the mere bearer of a will external to itself. However, that purposeful will is made extinct when we become performance-based machines. We are afraid to spare even the smallest amount of time to contemplate because reflection implies regression. A computer program never pauses and ponders its performance. ChatGPT would not abort itself even when asked the most meaningless question. If the goal was to render ourselves the best performance machine possible, there would be no time for reflection. The stake of realizing we’re on the wrong path is simply too high. We no longer enter the moment of suspension about “why we do what we do,” the essential moment that marks the distinction between us and machines. The unlimited can traps us in an infinite loop of purposeless self-realization. 

Perhaps there’s a silver lining. Self-exploitation sounds more easily escapable than slaving under a superior. If it’s all just a mind game of the self, playing its own master, couldn’t we just stop this dual-role-playing game of perpetrator and victim? Couldn’t we loosen the rein on ourselves if we put them on in the first place? Couldn’t we just let the self be? 

However, the difficulty of combating positivity lies in the disappearance of Otherness. For once, no external authorities are legislating our actions and desires. A drive for self-improvement is never identified as a disease to be cured. Instead, it is often considered the best part of us. The violence of positivity is, by its nature, immanent. This is why neither the 10 hours of sleep, the seven-day detox trip, nor the therapy session unleashing repressed childhood memories is going to be the panacea to burnout. The moment we start looking for quick fixes to return to peak performance, we find ourselves right back where we started in the dialectic of positivity.

The question is not how to avoid burnout and optimize our performance. It is a question of how to imagine a new system of vocabularies to justify our actions without falling prey to the unlimited can. Maximization is the language of machinery. We set ourselves up for failure when we constrain life to this language, to a fully-packed schedule of productivity. In this mousetrap, we believe that the only way to assert individuality is to become the best-performing machine. 

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has a remark on time: “Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment.” It’s a familiar feeling to most of us that time passes in arresting moments, like a random afternoon when you suddenly understood something your mother said ten years ago. There is an inevitable futility to the attempt at binding time to a number line. The demarcation between one hour and the next is nothing but arbitrary. Paradoxically, when we beat time down to the very minute, trying to max out its potentiality, the possibility of change is foreclosed. Production becomes the subject and you, the very thing you set out to change, become secondary to it. Surrendering a day to colorful compartments on the Google Calendar is an abdication of time, and ultimately, of the self we seek to become. 

Attempting a new answer to “why we do what we do” starts with affirming life – life as it wanders in the labyrinth of time. It starts with realizing that no one hour is comparable to another, nor is my hour comparable to yours. It starts with living in, rather than planning and executing, a day in our life.