Why You Hate Modern Work

today everyone is an auto exploiting laborer in his or her own Enterprise the term burnout has been thrown to the Forefront of public discourse over the last few years as mental health issues continue to rise and a growing number of people become disillusioned with the in machinations of the modern world it is worth asking is work slowly killing us is there something about our attitude to labor and productivity that is gradually sucking the joy out of our lives and precipitating the expansion of our mental health issues well according to Korean philosopher buung chulan the answer

is a definitive yes and in his book The burnout Society he gives a philosophical analysis of why work is such a source of misery for so many people and how our inner psychologies have changed to increase the emotional pressure to be productive to Breaking Point get ready to learn how you have become your own bad manager why individualism is a double-edged sword and how we have slowly habituated treating ourselves as a mere means to an end as always there is more to the burnout Society than I can possibly cover in this video so please do

give it a read for yourself to begin his analysis Han draws a distinction between two different types of societies each with their own strengths and drawbacks and since this forms the foundation for the whole rest of his essay this is a fantastic place to start one discipline and achievement in Michelle fuko's discipline and punish the French philosopher outlines the many ways that the state and other institutions exert their control over the rest of us he examines prisons military institutions torture facilities and forc discipline as methods that are used to keep people in line and demonstrate

the power one group of people hold over another however Han thinks that overt discipline alone fails to account for the idiosyncrasies of modern burnout foran discipline is a very explicit means of using power it involves two parties one of whom is the disciplinarian and the other is the person being disciplined and no one is in any doubt which is which when a school boy was caned or a deserter was hauled up for Military Tribunal no one was confused about what was going on there was one person wielding power over another and choosing to punish them

there may have been various justifications or reasons given for this show of force but it fundamentally involved a relationship between two different people each of whom knew exactly where they stood however both Fuko and Han recognize that there are drawbacks to this explicit approach for the authorities carrying it out principally this sort of direct way of subjugating someone has the potential to arouse sympathy and pity from anyone watching you have to work a hell of a lot harder to make it seem like your power is Justified because on the surface you look like the bad

guy a judge sentencing someone to a long prison sentence has to make it clear that the punishment is deserved because without that context people would be outraged it would transform an administration of justice into a kidnapping this is one reason why Fuko thought we have hidden more and more aspects of our judicial system over time primarily Han argues that this sort of uncomplicated domination is no longer fit for the world of work while you might be able to convince someone to do a menial task more efficiently if you explicitly tell them they will suffer if

they don't in the modern world many jobs are just not quite that simple if a task requires a high degree of imagination or creativity then the application of fear will bring a lot of inefficiencies it will spark resentment frustration and limit the extent to which someone will genuinely apply their whole cognitive effort to their work they will do the bare minimum needed to escape punishment you might be able to make someone show up on time and sit at their desk for 8 hours but you won't be able to get them to do their best and

thus line your pockets as much as possible we don't need to take Han's word for it either in his book drive the surprising truth about what motivates us author Daniel pink explicitly recommends to Business Leaders that they are unlikely to get their best work from their employees by using explicit modes of coercion and control in some ways this is a great thing sure I can't say I massively enjoyed my last job before YouTube but it would have been a lot worse if my employer could beat me but Han is highly critical of what replaces the

culture of discipline which he calls the culture of achievement for Han a culture of achievement is is no longer defined by the explicit power relationships between the employer and the employee but instead a sort of fictional excessive Freedom coupled with the idea that anything is possible instead of negative barriers being imposed from outside positive self-directive motivation is encouraged from within this sounds like it would be a real step up and in some ways it is but for Han a culture of achievement merely shifts who is holding our whips while in a culture of discipline it

would have been someone else an overseer or an authority in a culture of achievement we are encouraged to terrorize ourselves we are taught to see our general task as human beings as to maximize productivity in whatever context we exist in and this is mostly enforced not by explicit external punishments but by a perverse internal moral system this is one reason why Han refers to cultures of achievement as suffering from an excess of positivity imagine that you are living in ancient Greece you are a laborer on a farm and your life is hardly materially Pleasant you

do backbreaking work for very little thanks and very little pay but at the end of the day you are not lied to about who chose this you were told explicitly that this is your place you are very unlikely to rise above it and that life is simply unfair in this way the gods and Fates are not kind or just and we cannot know their reasoning so while you may be incredibly unhappy in a whole host of ways you can recognize that you did not choose your situation this is not your fault of course this is

also an unhealthy extreme helplessness is a very dangerous state to existence but Han points out that excessive hope can be just as exhaused to be told that you can do anything carries the implicit message that if you are not where you want to be right now it is because of a personal fault and you have already fallen behind it tells you that your job is to achieve everyone else is doing it this is Again part of what Han calls the excessively positive outlook of the modern world it refuses to recognize that certain things are impossible

or unrealistic or that we are sometimes constrained by outside forces far more powerful than ourselves it tells us that we are the gods of our own fate and that there is no one else but ourselves to blame when life goes wrong and it will go wrong put a pin in this point as it's going to come up a lot so we become our own disciplinarians chastising oursel for not already being better treating ourselves like defective models of what we really should be achievement machines pumping out work after work just to feel like we meet the

bare minimum standard required of a human being we start in a deficit and every moment spent not working is a moment wasted Han posits that this is a far more complete form of domination than just being punished by someone else although external punishments can be severe or unpleasant we always have the option of at least judging it as unfair or as kamu puts it rebelling against the injustices of the world we are taught that not only is there no one else to blame for our lack of achievements than ourselves but also there is no one

else else to blame for this blame we have become our own torturers cleaving pieces of our flesh away and calling the resulting meat rotten most of us don't even need to be kept in line anymore because no one could be as complete or uncompromising a Taskmaster as we are to ourselves and this totally solipsistic relationship we have made with our own work and productivity has another Sinister component it erodes the natural relationships we can form with others if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider subscribing to my patreon I

post exclusive casual videos there every week and your support would mean the world to me two isolation and individualism the second component of the exhausting nature of the modern world that Han identifies is the increasing atomization of people in some ways this goes hand inand with the methods used to construct the culture of achievement it plays on the idea that we are highly individualistic creatures who are totally free to pursue whatever we want while this remaining false in almost all the ways that matter the first thing to note is that in the modern day we

tend to prize the Supreme sovereignty of the individual at least in the west and in many ways this is a great idea it is part of the philosophical Foundation behind individual rights why it's very difficult to force someone to do something they don't want to do and at least in theory it curtails the direct authority of governments and organizations the basic moral unit of the modern day is the individual and this has numerous advantages however the level of individualism we currently encourage is also something of a historical novelty for much of human history it would

have struck people as absurd instead of talking about individual rights philosophers focused much more heavily on the concept of obligations and duties that we held towards the communities we are part of for instance Aristotle used to say that our true friends were not just people we had a good time with and could drop whenever we pleased but that they were important threads in the fabric of our lives and importantly we owed them our loyalty our honesty and our eth e and if we did not do this that was not just a poor personal decision it

was an ethical failing a general theme in much of Han's work even beyond the burnout Society is that we have lost this sense that other people are supremely important we have stopped appreciating the other in our lives and instead Place increasing importance on our relationship with ourselves it's not that he thinks everyone is walking around as total narcissists but rather he reverses that old idea that humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less for Han it is not that we think too much of ourselves but rather that we think of ourselves

too much and other people too little of course this makes sense within the context of an achievement culture if we have been assigned the role of our own overseer then we have no choice but to be vigilantly watching our movements we are the primary object of our own concern this leads to what Han calls an overheated ego that is neurotic self-obsession bordering on the unhealthy because the truth is it's actually quite unpleasant to be thinking of yourself all the time especially if you're judging yourself and constantly taking stock of your achievements and measuring them against

your Limitless potential even one of the most pessimistic philosophers in history Arthur schopenhauer talked extremely highly of the comfort and consolation that can be found when we recognize we are not alone in our boundless suffering everyone else is trapped here too and feeling just as much pain as we are he spoke of the need for communities where we could greet one another as comrades toiling under the same yoke of existence for Han this is another thing that is lacking in the modern world and is highly connected to the way that we approach work if there

is constant pressure to achieve and moreover this pressure is not just coming from without but also from within then this sends a rather unsettling message you are worthless if you are not currently achieving things this in turn does two things to our relationships with others it prevents us from being vulnerable and it encourages us to see other people as a achievements in themselves the first of these is pretty straightforward with a culture of achievement comes the idea that anything is possible and therefore if something is impressive you could have done it were it not for

some deep failing of your personality thus the first thing we want to learn about anyone else or show about ourselves are our achievements this is even reflected in one of the first questions we tend to ask people in Social settings what do you do which in effect is just a polite way of saying what have you achieved economically with the implicit it in a query how does it measure up to mine and if we are not doing as well then we ask ourselves why and asso all other answers but because I am a broken unworthy

person even if we don't think this ourselves we highly suspect that others might be doing so and we fear their judgment this means that being vulnerable and letting someone else see us becomes an incredibly high stakes game since there is this underlying idea that we could be perfect if only we tried hard enough our imperfections become not just quirks but evidence of our laziness people are working under the assumption that we have total freedom and so there's only one person to point out when things go wrong but how could we let someone else see not

just that we have flaws but that those flaws are entirely because we are too stupid or slothful to bother cleaning them up it is a twisted modern version of original sin we are born behind because we are told that Perfection is attainable the only difference is now we have to be our own Redeemer as well there is no grace of God coming to save us and grant us dignity only our own two hands and the promise that if we just achieve enough then we will be worthy of the respect of others since almost everyone else

is playing this same game presenting perfect pristine porcelain version of themselves in pixelated personal profiles this only hammers home the sense that we could always be better that we always need to achieve more and that nothing will ever be enough and this obsession with achievement bleeds into the personal relationships we do have firstly we can develop a sort of defensive judgment where to quote kamu we spit on someone's face so they cannot spit on ours first but we can also begin to view the people we know not so much for who they are but rather

what they can do for our own self-image we get involved in friendships of utility but we're not necessarily using them for money and fame but rather what knowing that person says about us and what their attention does for our ego this might be quite explicit as in the guy who brags he knows a whole bunch of celebrities but it can also be soliciting adoration from someone with no concern with how they feel or alternatively pining after someone because we think that if they turned around and liked us then our self-conception would finally be complete and

stable we compete for attention as the currency of our self-esteem it is not that any of this is necessarily malicious but it turns the other person into a vessel for ourselves and so it inevitably gets in the way of seeing them as their own individual a total other with whom we can forge a connection it prevents the I thou relationship from forming as Martin bber might say and it only gets worse from here because Han is deeply concerned with how we rest and recover and the ways this is distorted or even outright removed by Our

Endless self- enforced vigilance three no rest for the wicked the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote wrote that idleness was a deeply underappreciated aspect of human life while we tend to praise the hardworking and diligent Among Us Russell argued this had become far too extreme for him it is in Leisure that we are able to sample a far wider range of experiences learn more about ourselves and ultimately enjoy life more in his view the increasing puritanism of our work ethic was not a noble sacrifice in the pursuit of lofty Ambitions but rather a great trick

played on us by our richer overlords who benefited directly from all of that extra toil Under the Sun Russell wrote his essay In Praise of idleness in 1935 and according to Han our attitude to work has only worsened over time with the shift from the external Taskmaster to the internal one we have given the pressure of work uninterrupted access to our lives there are no ends to the demands we can make of ourselves and we are told that this is a character strength rather than a treasonous self- betrayal we tell other people about we are

unable to switch off after work or how much unpaid overtime we do we frame these as if they are complaints admissions of weaknesses but there is the unmistakable note of pride in our voice as we talk about how we struggle to tear ourselves away from our desks little do we know how much damage we are doing to ourselves Han thinks we are slowly losing the ability to say no to things in the logic of endless productivity more is always better why would you stop working after 8 hours when 10 would Grant want you more time

a family where is your ambition why would you even go on holiday apart from if the break will make you more productive when you get back even times of rest are instrumentalized not for what they can do for us but what they can do for our work this attitude means that the default response to should I work more is always yes and we must give ourselves special exemption when we say no and demand sovereignty over our time again when we couple this with the idea that we must be achieving more and more this leads to

a dangerous accelerative cycle at any moment we could be working we feel we must be working and achievements get harder and harder the more ambitious they become it is as if Copus is Boulder got slightly heavier each time he made it to the top of the hill but Han thinks this is fundamentally making us less free less agential he describes two kinds of potency the ability to motivate yourself to do something and the ability to give a firm no to something according to him we are losing the latter ability and that puts us on the

road to burning out and wasting our lives what kind of Freedom can we have if we are in constant service to this habit of working thinking about work and orienting our lives around work in contrast to Aristotle's idea that work needed to be done but was ultimately in service to Leisure we have adopted the position that our Leisure must serve our work the purpose of a weekend is not to give us time to enjoy life but rather to recharge for the week ahead and for Han this is a disaster because it is in the Stillness

and idle parts of life that we gain access to deeper Pleasures he describes a sort of profound boredom where we are not being stimulated but also that we don't mind this rather than crying out for something to do we learn to sit and let the activity of our minds wash over us we can reflect on what makes us happy what makes us sad what fulfills us and what troubles us we can work towards achieving socrates's vision of knowing ourselves we can use these breaks to exercise our creative faculties and take up Hobbies not for the

sake of turning them into a future side Hustle but instead for the sheer self-justifying enjoyment of them in other words it is in this Stillness that we learn to see ourselves not Through The Eyes of an overseer or a boss but rather as a friend someone who is worth looking after and whose feelings matter to us to use Han's terminology we cease to be Auto exploiters and instead turn our attention to other things entirely divorced from productivity or profit but if we are deprived of this opportunity we start to fill every Gap in our day

with just another thing to do we stretch to multitasking and we stop paying attention to the details of the world our perception becomes far less or inspiring and is robbed of its life and wonder instead becoming a blur we lose our sense of control and existence feels less like it is us making decisions are more like we are being pulled in a thousand different directions despite the fact that no one is forcing us us to do anything there is no gun to our head but there is the endless social and internal pressure to achieve at

all costs to have our lives together considering we are told that anything from our romantic success to our likability to our self-worth depends on this is it any wonder it takes such a dominant position in our psyches this is also a key component in Han's description of burnout we fill our lives with more and more labor until we cannot possibly do anymore we become exhausted but not in a way that is relaxing or satisfying but in a way that is isolating and self- condemnatory we collapse into bed and then have the gall to tell ourselves

that we are bad people for having done so in the burnout Society we have gone one step further than making labor a virtue and we have made Leisure a vice for Han this is Paving the road to disaster both at the individual and the social level but finally I want to link Han's Thoughts with that of some other philosophers to explore his idea that work can destroy a precious source of joy in our lives our selflove four means ends and self-hatred in an old Buddhist Fable the Buddha asked a king's wife who was most dear

to her the King was rather chuffed at this question and fully expected his wife to say his name however the queen paused for a moment and then said ultimately I am the person that is most dear to me she did not mean this in a narcissistic or self-obsessed way but rather she was declaring that her own feelings mattered to her she was on her own side fighting in her own Corner an end in herself everyone else concedes that they too hold themselves to be dearest in this way and the Buddha uses this as a lesson

for why we ought not to be cruel to others or to ourselves I love this story because in a modern context I actually think it rings a tiny bit Hollow the whole premise of the tale relies on the idea that it is common sense that people are beloved to themselves and I'm just not sure whether That Remains the case the running theme throughout H's essay is that we are slowly turning ourselves into a means to an end the end in question being productivity and achievement it is not just that we think achievement will make us

emotionally fulfilled it is that we think it justifies our existence that without it we are nothing it is a bit like how many Christian philosophers have viewed loving and serving God as the highest virtue but we have toppled the Divine and replaced it with production rather than praying in church we worship the gods of achievement while sit in office cubicles but this is inherently a very one-sided deal unlike with many religions there is not even a hint that productivity will love you back there is no relationship you can forge with your achievements it is all

giving and no getting back and since this is all driven by internal pressure there is very little possibility of breaking things off of leaving the religion of achievement we have all had Decades of conditioning telling us that we are not worthy in and of ourselves but must constantly prove that we are human by the sweat of our brow so is it any surprise that we find ourselves self-hating and alienated so far from the Buddhist idea that everyone is dear to themselves in a situation that worships productivity and production in and of itself the idea of

human flourishing as an end goal Fades into the background we no longer primarily see ourselves as an agent or an experiencing subject but rather as an object or a project that we can fashion rather than using Commodities we turn ourselves into them we view ourselves like we are a natural resource to exploit and we hack pieces off of us until we are burnt out and exhausted and this self-conception hardly encourages us to be kind or loving to ourselves this is not the hard work of passion or the genuine belief in a higher goal for your

labor it is the idea that we must become Achievers at any cost and if we are not then we are just losers we stop asking what all of this achievement is for and it becomes the moral meter of our universe then all that's left to do is to turn up into a tool to get as much of it as possible for Han This is highly likely to lead to self-hatred and self-aggression once we start treating something merely as a means to an end we stop caring for its needs and what it wants then when we

refuse to live up to our own outrageous demands we show ourselves no sympathy or care but treat ourselves like a defective tool we attempt to Brute Force more work out of us until it is clear that we cannot be salvaged and we burn out entirely you might think that that at this point we would finally wake up and give ourselves an emotional break from all of our nagging but Han gives no indication that this would happen after all the sensible thing to do with a broken tool that cannot be repaired is to throw it away

it has become worthless now so this is how we treat our own exhausted selves we beat ourselves up further saying that we are clearly not up to the task of being a proper human we are failures losers incompetents with no hope of redemption so deep is the internal voice of achievement that even when we are presented with the disastrous consequences of this approach we still won't give up our self flagellation if the choice is to be on our own side or on the side of work then work will win every time and no one is

going to take up our cause I want to end on this point because I find it uniquely disturbing throughout history various philosophers have undergone extreme torments from imprisonment to torture to execution and if you read their writings they often say the same sort of thing they can do what they wish with my body but they will never get at my mind they view that as their last Refuge even when they are dominated physically their mental state remains their own territory with endless forests to explore and Fields to play it but if Han is right then

this is not the case for us the culture of achievement has come to control not just our bodies but our minds as well and the everpresent Spectre of obligation or work looms large even at our least pressured moments depriving us of the feeling of ever being fully relaxed Han's crowning achievement in this essay is to show that burnout is not just unpleasant not just cruel but an existential threat to our relationship with ourselves but if you want more of this philosophically based cultural criticism then check out this video where I look at AIS huxley's Brave

New World and the disturbing parallels that can be drawn with our own and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life