The Burnout Society [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads
作者: Byung-Chul Han Stanford Briefs 2015 - 8
Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

finished reading The Burnout Society 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑
Surprisingly uninteresting, quite a disappointment. The book is a social critique written as a philosophy graduate essay: a lot of time is spent on stating analogies to describe modern society defended by other philosophers only to say that the description is inaccurate because so and so. The book has some pillar concepts related to "achievement society" but routinely reaches for unnecessary analogies to immune systems or alternative framings like positivity/negativity. The audience is people who read Heidegger instead of people who do want to understand burnout society.