the attention economy is killing us.

complaining about one's workload is pretty common I would say but I feel like we've reached a stage Beyond complaining burnout has become the mental illness of the 21st century I feel like it went from a condition that we would hear about every now and then to something that is really part of our Lives because we know friends or family members who burnout burnout has become an essential part of our Lives something we're confronted with all the time it doesn't matter if you're jenzy Millennial Gen X or Boomer burnout is now a common feature of our

lives under capitalism philosopher B Chuan wrote an entire book about it to kind of understand what it is what are its Origins so in the burnout Society that's the book he shows how the combination of hyper attention and what he calls the achievement Society are responsible for that so let's start with hypertension and yes I did write my script on paper and I feel very cool for doing it [Music] so hyper attention refers to the fact that we're over stimulated with information or entertainment we watch one Tik Tok video and then another and another and

it never ends we're now so so used to social media platforms being structured around the stream for us it's a a natural feature of social media and that's precisely what requires or creates hypertension the term hypertention for example implies that we're active in the process of scrolling and looking at all the content actually in his book ban shows that social media platforms social media Giants are very very good at um giving us the illusion that we have the power he says that all those operations all that work Free Labor that we do for platforms um

is presented to us as a form of unbounded freedom but that's an illusion the way our attention is distributed is predetermined by algorithms we are never free on the internet and the idea of hyper attention is so wrong because hypertension puts us not in a state of activity but in a state of passivity okay so that was hyper attention now let's move on to um the achievement [Music] Society so just to contextualize a little bit um in the 1960s philosopher Michel Fuko explains that we lived under a disciplinary Society where various forms of authority institutions

tell us what to do so from the school to the workplace we have to obey and remain disciplined well jonu Han challenges that a little bit according to to him this is not how we live anymore um that's why he came up with a new term the achievement Society to H we went from discipline so you have to do this you can't do that to achievement I can do this I can do that the discipline is no longer imposed on us but comes from within it is attached to the desire to self-actualize to become the

best version of yourself he argues that this Dynamic is super powerful and super pervasive because once again it gives the illusion of Freedom we choose to do a podcast a YouTube channel or you know to turn our hobby into a business so we are in the era of the entrepreneurial self for those of you who've been uh following my channel for a very long time maybe that will make you think of the video I did on the creative um the creative entrepreneur so according to bonuan the achievement Society is responsible for the rising burnout and

depression we tell ourselves that we're free that we can achieve everything so the pressure is no longer coming from the outside is coming from within the philosopher alandon behind the very popular uh YouTube channel the School of Life once joked about the fact that self-help books like those of um Anthony Robbins for example are often located in the same section as books on how to cope with depression anxiety loneliness or self-hatred you see the false promises of self-help or in our case the achievement Society can lead to deception depression that can then even turn into

resentment I say resentment because the first time I was um researching on that it was in the context of better understanding in cell culture and the resentment that a lot of incels uh feel is for me very much related to that to those false promises of the achievement Society you know the um if you're work hard enough if you spend a lot of time at the gym then you're going to uh be rich you're going to be successful and you're going to find a beautiful wife you know so anger resentment depression a loss of meaning

a loss of identity basically the combination of the achievement society and Hyper attention is killing us really [Music] dran wrote uh the burnout Society in 2015 and last year he published sort of a response to that Vita contemplativa in pra of inactivity it's a philosophical book that makes you want to quit your job book a train ticket go to the countryside rent a cottage write poetry I don't know but before we go deeper into the pH of inactivity I first want to look at the way it was corrupted by the achievement Society I'll go back

to the clal stuff later so what are the most common forms of inactivity sleep holidays while bonu H argues that they are still part of the logic of work capm as corrupted inactivity basically when it's the weekend when we are on holidays we're not inactive we are resting so that we can be productive for the next day of work that's why H says that we must create a politics of inactivity that is able to produce genuinely free time because what do we do now when we want to rest we scrw the average spring time in

the US is 7 hours and 4 minutes per day so we passively let screen guide our attention and feed us with endless dopamine now that's not what Leisure is supposed to be B inactivity is related to contemplation meaning the action of looking thoroughly at something for a long time google says contemplation is aimless and that my friends that is so at odds with what the achievement Society wants in the achievement Society everything needs to have a goal to have a purpose I'll share a quick anecdote um I'm French and in the culture of the theas

is a pretty big deal the tables and sits on the Terrace you face the streets to encourage contemplation and when we meet in the evening to have a drink at the Terrace we don't necessarily have an idea when this inactivity will end we'll say let's meet at 7:00 p.m. and then go with the floor when I get to the US in the UK I don't really see that the space in bars and cafes is organized in a way that does not really encourage um contemplation and friend states are usually scheduled so that means that there's

always a plan to the [Music] in the achievement Society even sleep must be carefully measured and optimized it starts with the premise that your brain can be hacked using Neuroscience a field of research that has become super trendy in the past decade so neuroscientist Matthew Walker Matthew Walker neuroscientist and bestselling author and one of the world's leading researchers in sleep science it's going to blow your mind I knew he was going to be my guy when I saw he was under Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlet to talk about the six sleep hacks you

need there is a global sleep loss epidemic shaped by this thing called the modern world a he didn't drop the c word um modern world though is a very apolitical way of saying capitalism less sleep equals more productivity that is just not true insufficient sleep costs most Nations about $411 billion so that's Matthew and he's not the only one doing that that is exactly what Han means when he says that the achievement Society corrupted sleep and not just sleep look at an idea like the full- day work week for example it started as a leftwing

idea a continuation of the long struggle for paid holidays things like the 35-hour work week in France uh Etc the 4-day work week wasn't invented a decade ago leftwing thinkers and economists have argued for it for a very long time it just happens that it got more attention since covid as workers expectations around work have changed and bosses have had to look out for new Solutions Studies have shown that the full day work week can boost productivity and so that's it you've got your perfect solution there all of that to say that the logic behind

the 4- day work week is still somewhat capist the idea is to increase productivity using rest time more efficiently now obviously Han has a different view of inactivity and so he writes quote inactivity has a logic of its own its own language temporality architecture magnificence even its own Magic it is not a weakness or defect but rather an intensity which is however neither seen or acknowledged in our active and performance-driven Society we cannot access the riches of the realm of inactivity inactivity is a Radiance within human existence today it has spelled into an emptiness within

activity end of the quote so in his book Vita contemplativa H demands that we completely change our approach of inactivity he gave us a bunch of Tumbl or Instagram quotes like this one we owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless to what is intentionally converted what is unproductive indirect exuberant Superfluous to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose oh here's another one quote inactivity is the condition of the possibility of experience end of the quote quite cute isn't it so foran hypertension in the form of endless crawling is passive

and inactivity in the form of contemplation is active he quotes NCH who wrote in the wake of the Industrial Revolution that quote with the tremendous acceleration of Life mind and I have become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately and everyone is like the traveler who gets to know land and its people from a railway Carriage now reading this book made me think of the unpleasant feeling I had whenever I visited my grandmother at the care home she was staying at until she uh passed away last year I was in a constant state of

low anxiety thinking about how bold the pensioners looked and how um death was approaching really bordom and death are two states of inactivity so I found it interesting that those States tend to trigger my anxiety I mean even when I look at pets sometimes I get a similar feeling I can't stop thinking about how Bor they must be trapped in a house or a flat most of the day how limited their lives are uh but maybe I'm the problem I you know that feeling says a lot about me and um how obsessed I am with

productivity all the time in fact seeing my grandmother at the care home and doing things with her at a slow pace forced me to work on that at the beginning for example I would bring some work with me and after a few months I stopped doing that I made sure to simply be there to sit on the bench with her to look around us to contemplate to talk to her listen to her favorite songs with her sing them to her even it felt pointless at at times because she would usually forget that we even came

to say hi or what sort of activity we did but I guess that's what Han refer to here it doesn't have to have an outcome in order to be meaningful like we're all going to die so when you really think about it everything is a bit pointless that's why depression is so common these days we're exhausted to have to attach a purpose to everything we do we live in denial of life's pointlessness instead of accepting it and creating meaning from there you see after my grandmother died um so during the funeral we played the last

song I played and sung to her when she was at the hospital incapable of speaking so she couldn't sing she was going to pass away the next day but this little um useless gesture continues to mean a lot to me now I've praised H work a lot in this video but I also want to share uh some [Music] criticism I want to go back to that quote I read earlier quote we owee true happiness to the useless and purposeless to what is intentionally converted what is unproductive indirect exuberant Superfluous to beautiful forms and gestures that

have no use and serve no purpose I read this thinking about what I feel when I contemplate so when I go on the walk when I sit and look out the window when I go to an old Gallery is this really happiness that I feel I wouldn't say so I don't agree that happiness is achieved through contemplation I think it's a different type of feeling for me it's a feeling of slight Melancholy and Clarity that I love so I found it interesting that hor connected contemplation to happiness it reflects our um society's obsession with toxic

positivity you know the idea that the ultimate goal in life is happiness and that things are only valuable if they bring happiness I don't agree with that I think that contemplation can bring up a bunch of different emotions including sadness but that doesn't make it less worthy for me a fulfilling life is a life full of emotions in all their variety sadness anger Joy Fe love this second point is going to sound very specific but it connects to bigger topics um I feel like hansburg is or can be read as a manifestor for inactivity and

that in order to reach as many people as possible hun chose to depoliticize in activity I mean sure as it is the case in his other books Han criticizes Neil NE liberalism but I feel like the criticism isn't strong enough he just drops the word NE liberalism here and there to remind us of his progressivism in my opinion it failed to compensate for the fact that there is a bit of a toxic Cal vibe to this book ay things were better before emphasized by the fact that pretty much all the artists and thinkers he references

in the book are white European and dead gosh my winess is sh Now isn't it the old white man again I mean he chose to reference those we perceive as archetypes of wisdom people whose identities aren't political and I think that's why the text is so easy to like and why it has this sort of undisputable authority don't get me wrong I really enjoyed hansburg I love most of his work and I love the idea of promoting contemplation but gosh my winess is sh Now isn't it well the world of contemplation the world of silence

for example often feel like an ideal in our modern ities where everything is like go go go go but we have to make an effort to think about who's creating all that noise you know which voices are heard for example Han quotes the L Praise of Silence quote what a relief to have nothing to say the right to say nothing because only then is there a chance of framing the rare even rarer thing that might be worth saying I resonated with that quote when I saw it in the book Because I had already referenced it

in one of my videos on technology but this time as I was reading it I felt like that was was something wrong when I read this quote now I think about the people who didn't choose silence but whose stories were silenced or dismissed I think about how eager they must be to speak up and be heard or how they've been forced into a state of endless contemplation of the ways in which those who talk too much have mistreated them I think about how eager they must be to finally tell us all the things they have

discovered as they were contemplating things that might be worth saying so it kep me thinking can we talk about contemplation inactivity without romanticizing the past without making it look like a Reach people only fantasy well yes yes we can two years ago I went to an open rally of uh the leader of the French left Jean luk M that was happening in Lil in the north of France so the north of France has suffered a lot from the industrialization it's one of the poorest areas in France Mila knew that when he came to Li but

instead of talking about common workingclass topics like workers rights purchasing power healthare Etc he chose to talk about something completely different the right to quiet enjoyment yes quiet enjoyment a term that is normally used in private property law but the more he went on talking about quiet enjoyment the more it made sense The Independent Media reporter reported that 25 million French people are exposed to harmful noise which mostly refers to the noise made by transports trains planes roads Etc but guess who's more likely to leave close to heavy traffic to airports to train stations the

working class that's why talking about the right to quiet enjoyment in the north of France makes a lot of sense and you know noise pollution isn't just a disturbance it can increase your chance of developing cardiovascular diseases it decreases your lifespan Milan also talked about the way noise and night pollution affects other living beings like Birds insects and a bunch of other animals who struggle to orient themselves and find food for survival so that means that the lives of Working Class People and biodiversity are hurt by the deafening and blinding forces of industrialized societies they

deserve a rights to quiet enjoyment now talking about social justice imagine that the noise the disturbance isn't coming from cars or trains or planes the noise the disturbance is coming from bombs I with this is the last Garden Of aliper Who eventually died from a bomb he explained that the garden is a site of construction life and hope among destruction and despair locals came to the gardener to get flowers to brighten their day in the past months we've also heard about the olive trees burned in South Lebanon because of Israeli shelling vulnerable living beings whether

they are humans or animals who took care of the land who live on the land are being displaced or destroyed by the forces of industrialization the forces of un limited growth acceleration and power they've been quietly living and resisting against that noise against that destruction and today more and more people are listening to them I mean it's true I've seen more and more forms of collective resistance against uh hypertension acceleration like I'll give you a very concrete and very relevant example those of you who've been on YouTube for a long time might know about the

retention editing style journalist Taylor Lawrence defines retention editing as the ideal way to keep a user glued to their screen and she adds this stle features loud sound effects Fast Cuts flashing lights and zero poses while retention editing might be coming to an end in her article for the Washington Post Lawrence writes about Mr BEAST's tweet asking YouTubers to quote get rid of the ultra fastpaced or the same era of content he said that in the past year he has slowed down his video focused more on storytelling and quote let scenes breathe yelled less and

focused on longer videos and he still gets a lot of views if not more views she also writes about Sam suk's impressive rise on social media despite his super minimal style of editing I'm highlighting this because I feel like it's a good example of the fact that um hypers stimulation super fastpaced content acceleration in general is getting more and more criticized and that criticism is no longer limited to you know Niche communities on the internet um Wellness communities often anti- advertisement anti capitalist communities as well no that criticism is coming from Mr Beast and Sam

suluk who have millions of followers from various backgrounds so now it's time to develop that Consciousness to politicize it to resist this idea that real quiet can only be found in non-political spaces in boura art or literature rather than gance amidst wall or the French protest against the retirement reform I mean the right to quiet enjoyment for all can only be achieved through politics but in order to get there we're going to have to make a lot of noise against those who want to keep us quiet that's it for today I hope you enjoyed it

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