Byung-Chul Han, Beyond Disciplinary Society
Our culture convinces far too many of us to chase things that are not aligned with our ideal states of being. We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”1 But constantly trying to be “better” can pu
... See morePaul Millerd • Good Work : Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition
So when someone declares that we can reshape our understanding of excellence and achievement around strange new principles appointing human beings as the center of our social universe, it’s understandably difficult to swallow.
Todd Rose • Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment
The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the mast... See more
an achievement-subject nonetheless “wears down in a rat race it runs against itself”: “The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performanc
... See moreJenny Odell • Saving Time
Since the 1970s, productivity has grown at 3.5 times the rate of pay for American workers. Precarious employment has risen by 9 per cent since the late 1980s, and we have seen extraordinarily high levels of burnout in the workforce. In short, we are underpaid, insecure, and burned out. And yet the achievement society – with its injunction to be mor
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