In The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung Chul Han explores the ways in which a sense of isolating tiredness can be produced by conditioning individuals for self-exploitation. To unpack this idea, Han presents a trans-civilizational shift from what he calls the ‘obedience society’ of the 20th century to the “achievement society” of the 21st. First, he explains that in Western liberal democracies, the last several generations of individuals were conditioned for obedience in order to maximize their productivity; an individual of this psychological milieu Han calls an obedience subject. Obedience subjects were told who to be and what they should and should not do, and therefore their single imperative to is simply conform. Importantly, they relate to their productivity as a sort of obligation or duty; they engage in production only as much as is required of them.
Han then points out that, ultimately, obedience subjects can never achieve maximum productivity because they don’t carry a psychological desire to be productive. The only way to achieve maximum production is to condition individuals to become addicted to and driven by the concept of achievement. When this happens, the obedience subject transforms into the achievement subject. Unlike their predecessors, achievement subjects want to work. They are told they can be anything they can dream of and there is no limit to their potential if they work hard enough. Unlike the obedience subjects who are governed by should and should not, achievement subjects are compelled by an infinite sense of can, a limitless potentiality. This sense of infinite possibilities guarantees that no matter how much an individual achieves, they never reach a sense of satisfaction because there is always more, and therefore, their production never ceases.
Under the logic of achievement society, the individual is solely responsible for their own success and self-realization. Everything is turned into a grind; every single second of life becomes oriented towards self-improvement under the gospel of performance. It’s not only about becoming financially successful; the achievement subject also treats their own identity as a project that demands constant production. This desire to become the “best versions of ourselves” drives an enormous economy of physical, mental, social, and spiritual self-improvement. Everything is about appearances, about social media stories and proving (both to ourselves and others) that we are constantly producing (some prefer the term “manifesting”) higher versions of the ego-self.
The incredible strangeness of this milieu is that the achievement subject believes that they are free from the domination of the obedience society, free to be and to become themselves in a liberated way. But, as Han expertly points out, in this achievement society, violence and domination have not disappeared, they have simply been internalized. For the achievement subject, the self is both the master and the slave, the perpetrator and the victim of their own self-exploitation. In essence, the achievement society compels individuals to be in constant competition with themselves, always one-upping the present self in an effort to surpass it in every moment. This leads the achievement subject to not only become increasingly narcissistic and self-referential, but also inevitably leads to exhaustion, as this pattern of infinite self-improvement is unsustainable. In our addiction to achievement, we run ourselves into the ground. In our compulsion for being the best versions of ourselves, we become too exhausted to even perform the character we have cultivated. In the face of being told we must constantly achieve new levels of personal greatness we eventually crack under this sustained pressure and fall into the state known as burnout.
Burnout reveals our cultural addiction to achievement. In obedience society, rest was still permitted, so long as it was done off the clock, but in achievement society, there is no such thing as “off the clock.” We often think that burnout is the result of a stressful job, but perhaps it’s truly the result of a stressful life? Under the conditioning of achievement society, we only feel good when we are achieving, which makes us feel stressed whenever we are not. We carry it around with us all day; we even transform things that we are passionate about into opportunities for achievement, whether through the social capital of likes on social media or the direct monetization of our projects. We rarely do things anymore that don’t signal to the world how wonderful we believe we ought to be, which reveals how the achievement addiction is really a byproduct of our own insecurity. More than the achievement itself, we want people to validate that we are living up to what we consider our own limitless potential. We want to believe that we were not lied to as children, that we really can become anything we dream of if we work hard enough, both externally through our labor and internally through our self-realization.
Thus, we are the source of our own tiredness and the architect of our own burnout. In our constant striving for achievement, we have forgotten how to stop, how to rest, how to simply be. Our infinite growth mindset, applied to ourselves, has created a psychology of busyness that we have no immune response to. We find ourselves struggling to slow down, to do nothing, to rest, labeling it as a waste of time, which is another way of saying a waste of our own potential. We are tired because we, the achievement subjects, will not allow ourselves to rest. And this can continue until the body says, “no.” Burnout is the endgame of achievement addiction, and though we have been conditioned to believe that the self is limitless, the body is not. The body, as our ecological identity, will not allow us to exceed a certain limit. Burnout isn’t the body punishing the ego; burnout is the body’s attempt to save itself by forcing us to stop. We resist it, but when we succumb, that is where we begin to form a new relationship to ourselves and perhaps also a new relationship with nature, with the world itself.
We can feel ourselves drifting towards burnout as an embodied sensation. Its harbinger is something like an incredible tiredness, one that we wake up with and remains with us throughout the day. Han describes this sense of tiredness specifically as an I-Tiredness: “Tiredness in achievement society is solitary, isolating, divisive tiredness. A private tiredness; mine over here and yours over there. It is a speechless and blind tiredness, which destroys all proximity.” This is the tiredness of exhaustion, of being unable to do something, of dragging ourselves forward. This is the tiredness of the achievement society, a tiredness that resists rest because it is sees non-achievement as a form of suffering.
Then Han describes a different kind of tiredness, what he calls “We-Tiredness,” which is characterized by a sense of intimacy, proximity and blurred lines of separation. It’s the kind of tiredness you imagine when you settle into a beautiful natural landscape after a long hike, gazing over the sunset. Han writes, “As the ‘I’ grows smaller, the gravity of being shifts from the ego to the world… It is a tiredness that trusts in the world, whereas the I-tiredness is a worldless, world destroying tiredness…The trusting tiredness “opens” the I and “makes room” for the world.” This kind of “We-Tiredness” is an act of becoming accessible, to be see and be seen, to become part of the world.
When we find ourselves in this state of We-Tiredness, something begins to shift in our perception. The senses become sharper as we slow down; we are granted to ability to see what eludes our normally hyperattentive and neurotic minds. In the tranquility of such tiredness, things take on an almost magical quality. Han writes, “In such a tiredness, there is an aura of friendliness… This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of community that requires neither belonging nor relation. Human beings and things show themselves to be connected through a friendly and.”
How do we cultivate this sense of We-Tiredness and break out of the experience of I-Tiredness? Han offers no prescription, but I strongly believe that forest bathing is a practice of cultivating this exact sensation. The way I practice and guide, forest bathing is intentionally slow, restful and easy. The practice focuses on redirecting our attention away from our thoughts and towards the sensory phenomena of our embodiment. As people relax and enter an experience of embodiment, they reflexively recognize how tired they actually are. But because forest bathing is a practice without any objective, such tiredness presents no impediment to their practice; instead, it is welcomed. This welcoming of our collective exhaustion transforms the isolating embarrassment of private I-Tiredness into the friendly restfulness of We-Tiredness.
The interesting thing about forest bathing is that it’s almost effortless and yet something that most people really struggle with. The reason people struggle is because they only know how to exist within a framework of thought-driven achievement; they don’t know how to relax anymore. Forest bathing is as simple as intentionally creating time and space where we pay attention to our lived experience as bodies, as sensate beings. There’s nothing that is beyond us when we embrace the simplicity of this experience; we don’t need to try hard to achieve listening or seeing or tasting; we simply do them. Due to this simplicity, forest bathing invites people to let go of their achievement addiction. Given ample time to do something as simple as listening to the wind or sitting with the trees, there is no possibility to rush because there is nothing to rush towards. There is only the sensation of being here, in these bodies, in this place and in this moment.
By creating a space without the possibility for achievement, Forest Bathing also serves to suspend the self-referencing, narcissistic ego. In forest bathing, there are no awards or accolades. You cannot be “good” or “bad” at it, and therefore, there is nothing to achieve. Without the possible reward of achievement, the ego reflexively quiets down and settles into the background of our experience. When we are simply sitting under the sky, gazing at the clouds, listening to the birds, there is no need for a private self in those moments. There is no need for us to be ourselves, to produce ourselves. Without the possibility of any sort of production whatsoever (even spiritual, metaphysical or narrative), we may experience a sense of tiredness that is not framed as the inability to produce, but as the gift of time and interbeing.
In this We-Tiredness, we are not alone. The world is with us. Han notes that We-Tiredness, “suspends ecological isolation and founds a community that needs no kinship.” In Forest Bathing, perhaps this is the both the symbol and the function of tiredness: that it reveals to us that we are in community with the world around us, that we not alone, that we are not even discretely “ourselves.” As we let go of achieving anything, we relax into simply being, and this opens the door to experiencing a genuine ecological enmeshment.
What is beyond the cultural milieus of obedience and achievement? Perhaps this is the wisdom of the more-than-human-world? Does a tree obey or strive for achievement? Does the wind or the rain or the hawk in the sky? When we suspend ecological isolation, we restore the preconditions that naturally avoid exhaustion and burnout because we simply treat each moment as a web of relationships instead of our own private story. There is nothing to achieve, nor is there any compulsion to become something greater than we were yesterday. In seeing the world in this way, we become enmeshed in the story of We-tiredness, that all beings are effortlessly working together to create an emergent planetary biogenesis, one which has no direction yet is never lost. The prevalence of burnout suggests that we are trying too hard to become what we are not. It reminds me of one of my favorite Chinese proverbs: “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”
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· Find Yourself In Nature Cohort 4
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*Photos by Amos Clifford.