Subjects now exploit themselves voluntarily, leaving no exploiter to blame for exhaustion.
Evidence
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. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it. The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 35
Categorization
- XREF: This is the core of the reader’s stated purpose: since exploiter and exploited are one body, exhaustion has no one to blame — testable against the reader’s own week. — connects to: Man’s privilege now rests on monopolizing the unconscious, not consciousness. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 450
- SEED: ‘Compulsive freedom’ as a lens for self-help culture, hustle-culture content, and wellness optimization could anchor an essay.
- DEEPTHINKING: The coincidence of freedom and constraint, auto-exploitation being ‘more efficient’ because freedom attends it, is the paradigm-shifting centerpiece.