The imperative to achieve, not self-responsibility, causes burnout and depression.

Evidence

Yet depression also follows from impoverished attachment [Bindungsarmut], which is a characteristic of the increasing fragmentation and atomization of life in society. Ehrenberg lends no attention to this aspect of depression. He also overlooks the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions. It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. According to Ehrenberg, depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labor society. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 31

Categorization

• XREF: Directly rebuts Ehrenberg’s self-economy account; the causal claim the reader needs to marshal against the neuronal-pathology thesis. — connects to: Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout; Rising depression may be a reaction to unfulfillable acceleration expectations. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 110; Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 42

Related

• Burnout is the pathology of voluntary self-exploitation, not lost sovereignty (similarity 0.84)
• Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout (similarity 0.82)
• Depression, ADHD, and burnout stem from excess positivity rather than external threat (similarity 0.81)
• Depression is the self-exploiting subject’s loss of ability, an internalized war. (similarity 0.80)
• The exhausted achievement-subject, not sovereign man, is the one who exploits himself. (similarity 0.80)
• Depression and burnout stem from excess positivity, not repression (similarity 0.79)