The Burnout Society

The new human type, standing exposed to excessive positivity without any defense, lacks all sovereignty. The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself—and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. It is predator and prey at once.

It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health.

The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli.

If one suffers from a narcissistic disorder, one sinks into oneself. When reference to the Other goes missing, no stable self-image can form.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche formulates three tasks for which pedagogues are necessary. One needs to learn to see, to think, and to speak and write. The goal of education, according to Nietzsche, is “noble culture.” Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you”—that is, making yourself cap

What eludes Arendt in the dialectic of being-active [Aktivsein] is that hyperactive intensification leads to an abrupt switch into hyperpassivity; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus without resistance. Instead of freedom, it produces new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer.

The positivation of the world allows new forms of violence to emerge. They do not stem from the immunologically Other. Rather, they are immanent in the system itself.

burnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation.

Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient. The capitalist system is switching from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation in order to acc