Burnout Club

The era in which socialists and Marxists were more afraid of their own shadow than anything else is finally drawing to a close. For Communists all over the world, the New Year has never looked so red.

Karoshi (”death by overwork”) became a recognized cause of death in the 1980s. This includes heart attacks, strokes, and suicides linked to workplace abuses and poor life quality. If you visit Japan you may see signs of this normalized absurdity: salarymen collapsed in random public locations

The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down ... It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race

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“Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but... See more

There are countless think pieces now on the American loneliness epidemic. Estimates of friendless Americans range from 8% to 12%

The Burnout Society insists that power today works not through repression and persecution but by sly and insidious means of ‘self-exploitation’. In a self-administered regime of this kind, revolution is almost literally unthinkable: ‘Burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive,’ he writes later, in Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019).