The Burnout Society

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The basis of all of the above is the underlying idea that we’re free and that it’s up to us to seek personal fulfillment. After all, we’ve been told that we can be anything we want to be and nothing is beyond our reach. For the same reason, we set unrealistic standards for ourselves and push ourselves to the absolute limits to meet them. This race to excel leads to a new kind of depression. While Herman Melville’s Bartleby – an employee of a Wall Street law firm and protagonist of Bartleby the Scrivener (1856) – was depressed because he was too isolated, controlled and passive, modern Bartelby – any actor of the Performance Society – is instead depressed because he is too connected, free and active.

Burnout syndrome has 2 dimensions. The first is exhaustion, the physical and mental drainage caused by rapid expenditure of energy. The second is that of alienation, feeling like the work you’re doing is meaningless and it doesn’t really belong to you. With the expansion of the system of production comes an ever-increasing narrowness of functions to be filled by workers. Jeffries, Stuart (2017-12-30). "Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han – review". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-01-09. To question burnout isn’t to deny the scale of suffering, or the many ravages of the pandemic: despair, bitterness, fatigue, boredom, loneliness, alienation, and grief—especially grief. To question burnout is to wonder what meaning so baggy an idea can possibly hold, and whether it can really help anyone shoulder hardship. Burnout is a metaphor disguised as a diagnosis. It suffers from two confusions: the particular with the general, and the clinical with the vernacular. If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just . . . the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage—if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies—then it raises a historical question. What started it? Several thousand people commit suicide every year in South Korea. The main cause is depression. In 2018, about 700 school children attempted suicide. The media even talk of a “silent massacre.” By contrast, so far only 1,700 people have died of Covid-19 in South Korea. The very high suicide rate is simply accepted as collateral damage of the achievement society. No significant measures have been taken to reduce the rate. The pandemic has intensified the problem of suicide—the suicide rate in South Korea has risen rapidly since it broke out. The virus apparently also aggravates depression. But around the globe not enough attention is being paid to the psychological consequences of the pandemic. People have been reduced to biological existence. Everyone listens just to the virologists, who have assumed absolute authority when it comes to interpreting the situation. The real crisis caused by the pandemic is the fact that bare life has been transformed into an absolute value.

To gain assurance of your election, then, you need to know you are being productive, enriching yourself and your community through labor.

Han calls the logical extreme of this “we-tiredness” – in other words “I am not tired of you, but rather I am tired with you.” According to the modern work ethos, dignity, character and purpose are all available to workers if only they engage with their jobs. Employee engagement is also supposedly good for the bottom line. Gallup, which surveys workers on engagement, describes engaged workers in heroic, even saintly terms: Burnout, like P.T.S.D., moved from military to civilian life, as if everyone were, suddenly, suffering from battle fatigue. Since the late nineteen-seventies, the empirical study of burnout has been led by Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, she developed the field’s principal diagnostic tool, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the following year published “ Burnout: The Cost of Caring,” which brought her research to a popular readership. “Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind,” Maslach wrote then. She emphasized burnout in the “helping professions”: teaching, nursing, and social work—professions dominated by women who are almost always very poorly paid (people who, extending the military metaphor, are lately classed as frontline workers, alongside police, firefighters, and E.M.T.s). Taking care of vulnerable people and witnessing their anguish exacts an enormous toll and produces its own suffering. Naming that pain was meant to be a step toward alleviating it. But it hasn’t worked out that way, because the conditions of doing care work—the emotional drain, the hours, the thanklessness—have not gotten better. Spanish edition: La salvación de lo bello. Barcelona, Herder Editorial, 2015, ISBN 978-84-254-3758-8.

Notes

The foreign has been sublated: the modern tourist now safely travels through it. We are suffering from the violence of the Self, not the Other. The Protestant ethic and the glorification of work is nothing new; however, that old subjectivity which was supposed to also have time for healthy relationships with partners, children and neighbors no longer exists. There’s no limit on production. Nothing is never enough for the modern ego. It is doomed to endlessly shuffling its many anxieties and desires, never resolving or satisfying them but only shifting between one and the other. A. Only a repressive regime provokes resistance. On the contrary, the neoliberal regime, which does not oppress freedom, but exploits it, does not face any resistance. It is not repressive, but seductive. Domination becomes complete the moment it presents itself as freedom. What is uncanny about Covid-19 is that those who catch it suffer from extreme tiredness and fatigue. The illness seems to simulate fundamental tiredness. And there are more and more reports of patients who have recovered but are continuing to suffer severe long-term symptoms, one of which is “chronic fatigue syndrome.” The expression “the batteries no longer charge” describes it very well. Those affected are no longer able to work and perform. They have to exert themselves just to pour a glass of water. When walking, they have to make frequent stops to catch their breath. They feel like the living dead. One patient reports: “It actually feels as if the mobile were only 4 percent charged, and you really only have 4 percent for the whole day, and it cannot be recharged.” How to deal with this reality? How can we learn to manage and control the infinite stimuli that affect us, from communication to the internet, through the images and the violence of television news? How to be able to “hang up”? It is urgent to (re) learn the art of attention, listening, silence, stopping, giving space, not falling into the “gears” of consumption and production, so that human beings do not become, the purpose of which is to operate without alteration and at maximum yield. At a time when other professional colleagues question the narrator (who remains anonymous throughout history) about why he keeps a useless employee in the office, the boss decides to take strong but ineffective actions toward his clerk.