burnout society

deep tiredness rises to become a form of salvation, a form of rejuvenation.

Handke’s tiredness is not “I-tiredness”; it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He calls it “we-tiredness” (15). I am not tired “of you,” as he puts it, but rather I am tired “with you”

After He created it, God declared the Seventh Day holy. That is, the day of in-order-to is not sacred, but rather the day of not-to, a day on which the use of the useless proves possible. It is a day of tiredness.

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

Nietzsche advanced “sovereign man” in the name of cultural criticism, as a countermodel to the exhausted achievement-subject. That is why “sovereign man” is a man of leisure [Muße]. A hyperactive person would have disgusted Nietzsche: the “strong soul” keeps “calm,” “moves slowly,” and “has an aversion to what’s too lively.”28 Thus Spoke Zarathustr

The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life.30 It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields t

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.

In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage [verlernen wir auch die Wut]. Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present [Gegenwart]. It lacks all negativity, which w