The Burnout Society: the individual who exploits themselves

Nobody is imposing anything, and yet the guilt of not having got things done follows most people to bed: the scene Byung-Chul Han’s short book The Burnout Society sets up rests on exactly this familiar feeling. The book appeared on 4 October 2010 as Müdigkeitsgesellschaft from Matthes & Seitz Berlin, runs to 72 pages and, according to Wikipedia, has been translated into more than 35 languages. The argument of this piece is that Han’s strongest idea is the observation that modern power no longer works by prohibition but by producing a feeling of freedom, and that this observation offers a sharp but debatable explanation of today’s afflictions, from depression to burnout.

From the disciplinary society to the achievement society

Han starts from Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society: an order that works through institutions such as the prison and the factory, on prohibition and compulsion. The excerpt from the Stanford University Press edition published by the Courtauld Institute of Art shows Han arguing that an achievement society has replaced it. Its members are not obedient subjects but entrepreneurs of themselves. The modal verb that governs the disciplinary society is “May Not”; the one that governs the achievement society is “Unlimited Can”.

The difference is more than a difference of tone. For Han the disciplinary society is a society of negativity; it produces criminals and madmen. The achievement society leaves negativity behind and turns to positivity, and the figures it produces are depressives and losers. Han also holds that the drive to maximise productivity persists across both eras, and that the shift to “can” is a more efficient way of reaching the same goal. This is the subtlest point of the book: freedom may not be the lifting of pressure but its internalisation.

Han also finds the widely used concept of the control society inadequate, since it still contains too much negativity. In the achievement society no external overseer is needed, because the overseer is now the subject.

Exploiting oneself

The book’s most quoted idea is self-exploitation. According to the Courtauld excerpt, in the achievement subject the exploiter and the exploited are the same person. This is more efficient than external exploitation because it feels like freedom. When nobody forces us, we cannot send the bill for our exhaustion to anyone. Class struggle turns from a fight with an outside boss into an inner struggle with oneself; Wikipedia summarises the view as the individual being both master and slave in their own enterprise.

Han ties this picture to a psychiatric diagnosis as well. As Wikipedia reports, he holds that depression, attention deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder and burnout are infarcts caused by an excess of positivity rather than infections caused by negativity. On depression, the Courtauld excerpt records that Han parts company with Alain Ehrenberg, tying depression not only to the demand to be oneself but to the pressure to achieve and to fragmented social bonds. A sentence from the same excerpt gives the core of his thought: depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity.

Echoes in present-day life

It is not hard to find everyday counterparts for these ideas, though each example is an interpretation and not Han’s own data. Working from home erasing the limit of the working day, the growing expectation of constant availability through notifications, a culture built on self-improvement and productivity, the pressure of personal branding: all can be read as scenes of a demand for performance that is internalised rather than imposed from outside. Still, that reading belongs to the reader, not only to Han. For a Turkish-language readership the book appeared as Yorgunluk Toplumu, translated by Samet Yalçın and published by Açılım Kitap. A book review in a Turkish journal on DergiPark (İçtimaiyat, 2021) records that by 2017 the book had reached its third printing and has seven chapters, among them Disiplin Toplumunun Ötesinde (Beyond Disciplinary Society) and Bartleby Vakası (The Case of Bartleby). According to the same review Han characterises the past as a viral society and the present as a performance society and a neural society. That the book has been discussed in Turkish academic writing shows the concepts have entered the local debate, but it contains no Turkey-specific data or measurement.

Han’s idea also offers an interesting inversion for reading Apple TV+’s Severance. In our Severance piece we looked at a corporate order that splits work from private life by surgery: there the boss is outside, and the boundary is drawn from outside. In Han’s achievement society no boundary is drawn, because the boss is already inside. The two texts can be read as complements: one describes a power that divides work from outside, the other a desire that keeps work going from within.

Critique: striking, but how well evidenced?

Criticising Han is as necessary as understanding his strength. The first question concerns style. Wikipedia reports that the Hong Kong Review of Books praised his concise, aphoristic writing but said he sometimes veers into billboard-sized statements, walking the line between cleverness and sloganeering. Other commentators note that his prose is closer to literature or poetry than to the usual philosophical essay. This is both an advantage and a limit: the ideas stay in the mind, but generalisations proceed without being demonstrated.

The second question concerns weight. While stressing that people exploit themselves, Han’s picture may push material necessity into the background. Not everyone enters the performance race freely; for some, flexible work is not a preference but the only way to make a living. This is a reading and an objection: how much room necessity occupies within the book’s framework has to be argued separately. The third question concerns diagnosis: tying clinical problems such as depression and burnout to a single social cause risks overlooking medical and individual factors. Han’s claims make sense inside the book’s own philosophical frame, but they are not medical evidence.

About the author and the book

Han was born in Seoul in 1959. He first studied metallurgy at Korea University, then went to Germany, where he studied philosophy, German literature and Catholic theology in Freiburg and Munich, completing his doctorate in Freiburg in 1994. From 2012 to 2017 he taught at the Berlin University of the Arts. The English edition, translated by Erik Butler, appeared in August 2015 in Stanford University Press’s Stanford Briefs series.

Conclusion

The Burnout Society ties the exhaustion of an age not to an enemy outside but to a command within. The diagnosis is not beyond dispute, but it is useful: against the habit of reading exhaustion as personal failure, it offers a social frame. What falls to the reader is to use that frame as a question and not a verdict: which of the things I want to do are truly mine, and which am I expected, from within, to do?