In Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Burnout Society, he argues that people are pressured to be “entrepreneurs of themselves” but people feel like they can never do enough. He hypothesizes that this drives a lot of depression.
Entrepreneurs of Ourselves
From Good Work:
Our culture convinces far too many of us to chase things that are not aligned with our ideal states of being. We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.” But constantly trying to be “better” can push us toward goals that are not ours, robbing us of our connection to ourselves.
This pressure makes it easy to overlook feelings of discontent. We tell ourselves that we should be grateful for our circumstances, especially once we’ve landed that “good” job. We dismiss stress, relationship challenges, long hours, or lack of personal time as trivial costs, necessary trade-offs we must make. Our focus shifts to the material outcomes that a job provides: the dream home, nice cars, and luxury vacations.
This creates an illusion. We start to identify more with our possessions than ourselves, convinced we can “have it all” no matter how we structure our work lives. Yet, deep down, we know this is a lie. I’ve talked with countless high-paid professionals in a state of low-grade misery, who ask me, “How do I find a new path without giving any of this up?”
Ambition That’s Aligned With What We Care About
I suspect there is a very subtle balance between ambition that’s aligned with what we care about and ambition that is serving the expectations of others. How do you transcend this? I asked Gena Gorlin in our Q&A:
I think the difference between “ambition that’s aligned with what we care about” (i.e., the builder’s ambition) and “ambition that is serving the expectations of others” (i.e., the drill sergeant’s ambition) is the whole issue. …
The solution is not simply to relinquish control or “cut yourself some slack” for falling short of the drill sergeant’s standards, Zen-style; it’s to question whether and, if so, why these are the standards that actually matter to you, with your fully-lived life as the yardstick.
Highlights
Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.
The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination.
They are entrepreneurs of themselves.
However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.
Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves… . The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.
The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.”
According to Arendt, modern society—as a society of “laboring” [Arbeitsgesellschaft]—nullifies any possibility for action when it degrades the human being into an animal laborans, a beast of burden. Action, she maintains, occasions new possibilities, yet modern humanity passively stands at the mercy of the anonymous process of living. Thereby, thinking degrades into calculation, mere cerebral functioning (“reckoning with consequences”). All forms of vita activa, both the matter of producing and that of acting, sink to the level of simple laboring. As Arendt sees it, modernity began with an unprecedented, heroic activation of human capacity, yet it ends in mortal passivity.
The term vita contemplativa is not meant to invoke, nostalgically, a world where existence originally felt at home. Rather, it connects to the experience of being [Seinserfahrung] in which what is beautiful and perfect does not change or pass—a state that eludes all human intervention. The basic mood that distinguishes it is marveling at the way things are [So-Sein], which has nothing to do with practicality or processuality.
Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”1 If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available