Too Tired to Live? on The Burnout Society

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

Criticism of The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Once published, The Beauty Myth By Naomi Wolf quickly became a bestseller and elicited mixed reactions from the readership and the media. From a feminist angle, Wolf mainly received acclaim for her book and hypothesis. The book has been praised by the likes of Germaine Greer , Fay Weldon and Betty Friedan . The American newspaper The New York Times called it one of the most important works of the twentieth century. 

Several thinkersbelieve that Wolf is grossly exaggerating the numbers on anorexia . Social critic Camille Paglia called Wolf's historical research and analysis 'flawed'.

In Opzij , Anja Meulenbelt wrote that Wolf's argument was by no means new, but that it was simply packaged differently, or in a more fashionable way. A journalist who reported about this in the NRC in 1994 pointed out that Meulenbelt accuses the attractive Wolf of personally benefiting from the Image Myth.

In Who Stole Feminism? (1994) Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the claim that 150,000 women are dying each year from anorexia in the United States, arguing that the true figure is probably between 100 and 400 per year. 4

Similarly, a 2004 article compared Wolf's eating disorder statistics with statistics from peer-reviewed epidemiological studies and concluded that "on average, an anorexia statistic in any edition of The Myth of Beauty would have to be divided by eight to get closer to the real statistic. ' Schoemaker estimated that there are approximately 525 deaths annually from anorexia, 286 times less than in statistics Wolf.