Burnout is the pathology of voluntary self-exploitation, not lost sovereignty
Evidence
Burnout, which often precedes depression, does not point to a sovereign individual who has come to lack the power to be the “master of himself.” Rather, burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation. The imperative of expansion, transformation, and self-reinvention—of which depression is the flipside—presumes an array of products tied to identity. The more often one changes one’s identity, the more production is dynamized. Industrial disciplinary society relied on unchanging identity, whereas postindustrial achievement society requires a flexible person to heighten production. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 119
Categorization
- DEFINE: Directly corrects Ehrenberg’s psychological reading and substitutes the economic mechanism of voluntary self-exploitation.
- XREF: The identity-flipping dynamizes-production claim parallels the reader’s own week of juggling multiple selves; also echoes the postmodern flexibility critique. — connects to: Voluntary self-reform can succeed on symptoms without altering the fundamental project. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1132; Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout; Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 42
Related
- Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout (similarity 0.85)
- The imperative to achieve, not self-responsibility, causes burnout and depression. (similarity 0.84)
- Subjects now exploit themselves voluntarily, leaving no exploiter to blame for exhaustion. (similarity 0.80)
- The exhausted achievement-subject, not sovereign man, is the one who exploits himself. (similarity 0.80)
- Depression is the self-exploiting subject’s loss of ability, an internalized war. (similarity 0.78)
- Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness (similarity 0.78)