burnout society

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

There are two forms of potency. Positive potency is the power to do something. Negative potency, in contrast, is the power not to do—to adopt Nietzsche’s phrasing, the power to say no.

To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, or, in other words, by the positive scheme of Can; after a certain level of productivity obtains, the negativity of prohibition impedes further expansion. The positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should. Therefore, the soc

In my experience, burnout has nothing to do with working hard and everything to do with feeling no control or impact.

— Sari

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 master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneousl

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”

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