The Burnout Society

Han’s diagnosis is that the disciplinary society Foucault described — walls, prohibitions, the institutional “No” — has given way to an achievement society ruled by the word “can.” Its inhabitants are not oppressed subjects but entrepreneurial “achievement-subjects” who exploit themselves voluntarily, and its signature illnesses are no longer hysteria and repression but depression, ADHD, and burnout: infarctions of excess positivity rather than pathologies of prohibition. First published in German as Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2010) and translated by Erik Butler for Stanford’s Briefs series, the essay runs barely seventy pages and became one of the most widely read philosophy books of its era, translated into more than 35 languages.

Its relevance has only grown in the age of AI: this is a book about what happens when optimization becomes a way of life, written before large language models made frictionless productivity feel like an obligation. Han’s counter-proposals — deep boredom, contemplation, the right to be tired — read today less like nostalgia and more like a manual of resistance.