This kind of exhaustion is all too familiar. Not the tiredness that follows a long day of hard work, but the fatigue that greets us first thing in the morning. It has no clear medical name—but it doesn’t need one. Everyone feels it. This inner exhaustion lies at the heart of The Burnout Society, a short and piercing book by South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
Han, who lives and writes in Germany, offers a stark but lucid diagnosis: in recent decades, Western society has shifted from a logic of discipline to a logic of productivity. Once, we were governed by the figure of the “obedient person,” hemmed in by rules, institutions, and prohibitions. Today, we are ruled by the “achievement subject”—a self-driven individual addicted to possibility, initiatives, personal projects—and ultimately, self-exploitation.
The Quiet Revolution of Freedom
In a world where you are your own boss, there is no one to rebel against. The boundary between work and rest blurs. Work calls during dinner, emails after midnight, a personal project on Sunday—all blend into a single motion of self-optimization. But optimizing for what? For the idea that we can—and must—always become better, more efficient versions of ourselves.
Han argues that the cruelty of this system lies in its illusion of freedom. No one forces you to stay late. You just want to succeed. You choose to hustle. You choose not to rest. That’s the trap: entrepreneurial values have become so internalized that freedom itself becomes a mask—concealing a deep structure of control and exhaustion.
From Mental Illness to Exhaustion Syndromes
Burnout, in Han’s view, is not just a cultural condition—it seeps into the language of medicine. The age of repression and neurosis has given way to an age of depression, burnout, ADHD, anxiety disorders. The body and mind collapse under the unrelenting demand to stay focused, aligned, and constantly renewed. There is no recovery time between tasks—we are consumed by them.
And it's not just freelancers in tech. High school students, social activists, artists, public servants—everyone operates under the same inner logic: if you’re not progressing, you’re failing. If you’re not improving, clearly you haven’t tried hard enough.
True Freedom Begins with Slowing Down
Han’s message is not nostalgic, but courageous. He doesn’t call on us to stop working—but to start asking why, for whom, and who decides the metrics of success. He is not a romantic advocate for laziness, but a philosopher of tempo: one who cannot pause, cannot truly choose.
Real freedom, he suggests, is born in spaces where we are not being measured. In words spoken not to persuade. In relationships not built for profit. In thoughts without an objective.
Perhaps it is precisely there—in the wild inefficiency of the unnecessary—that we can begin to imagine a different kind of life. Not a burnout society, but a listening society
