Byung Chul Han. This guy thinks.
Some great insights from his book Burnout Society, thanks to Philosophy Break:
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No longer do we live in a society characterized by hard institutional power, a society described by the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault as closed, brutish, oppressive — a “disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories,” Han writes.
For, in the 21st-century, such a world has been replaced by “a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories.”
We are no longer the “obedience-subjects” of disciplinary society, Han claims, but the “achievement-subjects” of achievement society.
The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’
We might sloganize such an approach as follows:
* Less calculation, more contemplation
* Less optimization, more leisure
* Not ‘side hustles’, but cultivation
As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declares:
All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange — you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself. If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting — not even for laziness!