The Burnout Society, Sixteen Years Later

The Burnout Society is a short book by the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, published in German in 2010 and in English in 2015. Han argues that the West has moved from a disciplinary society, built on prohibition, to an achievement society, where people drive themselves to exhaustion in the name of freedom. He argues that burnout and depression are its signature illnesses.

Sixteen years later, this book deserves a reappraisal.

Like most knowledge workers, I feel, in some sense, far more burnt out than I did in the 2010s. The techno-optimism that began to dominate US business culture in the early 2010s, during the recovery from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, has now turned into cynicism and exhaustion.

Han's book still describes that exhaustion well. Rereading it now, though, I think it gets the causes only partly right. Since 2010, a whole industry of business influencers has grown up around the process Han described, selling both the achievement ideology Han describes as well as relief from the anxiety the society of achievement produces.

However, even in 2010, that process had material causes that Han's account misses. These omissions occur because Han treats power as something that happens in the psyche and pays little attention to the labor market or physical networks.

What is The Burnout Society about?

Han opens by claiming that every era has its signature illnesses. He says the twentieth century was organized around bacteria and viruses. Medicine learned to fight these organisms as invaders from outside.

The early twenty-first century, by contrast, belongs to neurological conditions such as depression, ADHD, and burnout, which have no clear outside cause.

To explain the shift, Han starts with Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault described modern power as disciplinary, exercised in prisons, schools, barracks and factories through rules and surveillance. The population internalized this disciplinary power, making it governable.

Han thinks this picture no longer fits. Disciplinary society was organized around prohibition. Those who could not internalize discipline and manage themselves accordingly became criminals and madmen.

Achievement society, by contrast, is organized around the promise that you can do anything. Rather than criminals, the people it fails become depressives and losers. Note that the society valorizes wealthy felons like Martin Shkreli, Charles Kushner, and various rap moguls; law-abiding citizens stuck in low-wage jobs become invisible.

Its members are "entrepreneurs of themselves," a phrase that traces back to Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, later published as The Birth of Biopolitics (2008).

Han's key distinction is between "should" and "can." A prohibition has limits. Once you obey, you are done with it.

Potential has no such limit; there is always another goal to reach.

People in an achievement society do not need a boss standing over them. They push themselves and experience their own strenuous effort as freedom. This arrangement is highly efficient for bosses and managers. As Han puts it, "The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited."

For Han, burnout happens when someone told they can do anything finds out they can't.

Han insists that the achievement-subject exploits itself without a master. That last claim is where I think his work has aged worst. This is not a spooky psychological force; there is agency driving this form of social organization, even if it is opaque and perhaps dispersed.

What Han got right

His portrait of the achievement-subject, the person who exploits themselves and experiences it as freedom, still seems accurate. However, he was not alone; this conceptualization was already widely circulated in anarchist and ultraleft circles, particularly in France.

Three years before The Burnout Society, the Invisible Committee's pamphlet The Coming Insurrection (2007) described the same figure, a self that has become an object of work, reconfigured as an individual enterprise. Each person is boss and product at once, kept in a permanent state of anxiety.

We see this in the erosion of job security, the rise of at-will employment in the United States, the replacement of permanent jobs with project work and the gig economy. When I interviewed for a sales job with a Silicon Alley startup in the early 2010s, the hiring manager told me, "The most important thing you need to understand in this role is that you are your own business." Management at another tech company I worked for often described the business as a "refuge for entrepreneurs." The work culture has been reorganized to offload as much responsibility as possible onto individual workers and put them in perpetual competition with each other.

In the anemic job market of the early 2010s, tech CEOs could easily push this narrative among young people; they were the only industry hiring young people in large numbers for white-collar jobs. The Democratic Party was completely on board with their agenda. In Inside Job (2010), the documentary about the Global Financial Crisis, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer described venture capital as "The only functioning part of our financial system." Tech executives enjoyed unprecedented access to the Obama White House. Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2009 and later helped build the voter-targeting operation for Obama's 2012 campaign. White House visitor logs show Google representatives attending meetings there roughly once a week across both terms.

The VC and tech industries invested huge amounts of time turning their leaders into cultural icons young people looked up to. Peter Thiel launched the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, paying young people $100,000 to leave college and start companies, and turned his Stanford lectures into the bestseller Zero to One (2014). Elon Musk was cast as a real-life Tony Stark, with Jon Favreau citing him as an inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.'s performance in Iron Man. Y Combinator circulated Paul Graham's essays on starting a startup and, in 2014, put Sam Altman's Stanford course, "How to Start a Startup," online for free.

Moving slightly down-market to the "business opportunity" space targeting the petty bourgeoisie (and, increasingly, laid-off tech workers), the clearest current example is the business influencer. Alex Hormozi and Grant Cardone have millions of followers and present what looks like neutral business advice. The advice consistently frames financial insecurity as the viewer's own deficiency and presents self-optimization as the route to independence.

Jordan Peterson offered a more psychological version of the same message. He treated the urge to take political action in response to growing inequality as a symptom to manage. Rule 6 of his bestseller 12 Rules for Life (2018) is "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world." In lectures, he put it more bluntly as "clean your room," which in practice meant achieving middle-class respectability before worrying about society. Peterson also presents hierarchy as natural, famously pointing to dominance hierarchies among lobsters, so that complaints about inequality look like a refusal to accept how the world works.

That is very close to Han's achievement-subject, whose freedom consists in working on itself without limit.

Where Han has blind spots

While elites invested enormous energy in rebuilding consent for the society of individual achievement after the financial crisis, one reasonable objection to Han's narrative is that discipline never went away.

Software monitors and ranks gig and warehouse workers in ways that look more like Taylor's factory than the pseudo-freedom of knowledge workers. The sociologist Petter Törnberg describes platform work as combining Taylorist precision with precarious contracts, managed through ratings, scores and algorithms.

Han concedes some continuity between disciplinary and achievement society. But he also dismisses Deleuze's idea of a "control society" as too negative, because he wants to argue toxic positivity is the main driver of contemporary governmentality.

However, while toxic positivity is certainly still a part of contemporary governmentality, in the backlash to Woke I, and in the violent repression of protest movements, we currently see a more overtly coercive, authoritarian side to governance by the contemporary bourgeois bloc.

Perhaps this is because neoliberalism has lost legitimacy, and elites are trying to retain control despite declining consent. In this context, Han's dismissal of the society of control has become harder to sustain.

It seems particularly hollow in the age of algorithmic management of gig and warehouse workers and Flock surveillance drones. We were already trending towards ubiquitous surveillance in 2010, but Han could not have anticipated the current conjuncture.

Part of this is due to technology, but I would argue it is also political. Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously argued that hegemony requires a balance of force and consent. Toxic positivity and the dream of entrepreneurial success remain ways elites try to maintain consent. But as consent has eroded, elites face a crisis of authority and increasingly rely on force to maintain dominance. In Gramsci's terms, they no longer lead, but merely dominate.

How the influencers reinforce it

Han's insistence that the achievement-subject has no master made some sense in 2010. At the time, it appeared that way.

However, by 2026, it has become clear that financial and tech elites- there is no real separation between the two-are the masters of the achievement-subject.

The achievement-subject always served these interests. What changed after 2010 is how the narrative is maintained.

The first factor causing this shift is political-economic. After 2008, achieving middle-class status became increasingly difficult, even with a university degree. Many first-generation middle-class people had their home equity wiped out, meaning their children started from zero.

Han, writing from Germany, was less attuned to this dynamic in the Anglosphere. But in Europe, the Eurozone crisis also kept an entire generation un- or under-employed (mostly in southern Europe).

The second factor is changes in media consumption. Once social media became the main place people encountered ideas about work and success, the self-made entrepreneur story had to be repeated relentlessly. Figures like Thiel and Musk flooded YouTube with thought leadership content. Demand for content on how to succeed in the post-GFC economy was very high, including among people who had no hope of ever founding venture-backed companies but still wanted to succeed in small business. Business influencers stepped in to fill that role.

Small-business self-help figures are almost as old as the US republic, and figures like Dan Kennedy were running these kinds of businesses through seminars and direct mail starting in the 1980s. But Web 2.0 massively amplified their reach.

Business influencers give away content and earn money from courses, coaching, and paid communities.

At a broader societal level, they constantly reinforce optimistic narratives about digital entrepreneurship.

The influencers did not create this ideology, and they are not its main beneficiaries. The process Han described was already serving financial elites before social media existed. Influencers found a way to make money by keeping it going.

Among those masters are the platforms and the investors who own them. Platforms earn advertising revenue from the attention influencers generate, and their recommendation systems decide what content spreads. Törnberg describes them as "company-states" that regulate the markets they run. The influencer economy is one of those markets. The platforms profit whichever influencer wins; most aspiring influencers make little to no money.

What Han couldn't see in 2010

Even before the influencer economy took off, self-exploitation had material causes. Han says little about this, instead relying on psychological explanations.

The German edition appeared two years after the financial crisis. In the years before and after, job security and real wages declined across North America and most of Europe. Credential inflation and expanded access to higher education made a university degree a less reliable route to security.

Germany, where Han lives and writes, felt the crisis more softly and indirectly. German banks took heavy losses, but unemployment remained low, and most citizens experienced the crisis at a distance. That may be part of why Han, writing from Berlin, could treat burnout as primarily a cultural condition.

Other theorists place a much greater emphasis on economic causes for widespread burnout while still attending to Foucaultian governmentality. The political theorist Albena Azmanova argues in her book Capitalism on Edge (2020) that this shift from neoliberalism to precarity capitalism is the cause.

Earlier neoliberalism motivated people with the promise of opportunity; this was meant to pull them out of trade union blocs. Precarity capitalism, which she argues began in the early 2000s, motivates populations with the fear of falling behind. People who cannot count on an employer or a credential have strong reasons to treat themselves as enterprises.

Han explains this behavior as a cultural shift from prohibition to positivity. He mentions deregulation once, in passing, but he does not analyze labor markets, employment, or welfare provision.

Han takes from Foucault the focus on how power works through the self, and drops the political economy Foucault at least gestured toward. That leaves Han with the same gap as much writing on governmentality. It describes how people are governed without explaining what drives the shift from one regime to the next.

Some engagement with regulation theory might be helpful. In this tradition, associated with economists Michel Aglietta and Robert Boyer, each period of capitalism pairs a way of organizing production with a set of norms, institutions and habits that keep it stable.

Törnberg uses the regulation theory framework to describe the typical subject of platform capitalism as a "technoliberal subjectivity," shaped around what platform companies need. Read this way, Han's achievement-subject is the subjectivity that fits post-Fordist capitalism. The business influencer is one of the many institutions that now reproduce it.

Is Byung-Chul Han a Marxist?

Byung-Chul Han is clearly not a Marxist in any strict sense. Han borrows some Marxian vocabulary and discusses Marx in the first chapter of his later book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2014). But he replaces the exploitation of one class by another with the exploitation of the self. Moreover, the political edge of Marx's work is completely evacuated. He doubts the exploited will revolt. In his view, they are more likely to become depressed.

Even Marxists in the value-form tradition, who reject orthodox Marxism, such as Michael Heinrich and Moishe Postone, locate domination in the impersonal compulsion of capital rather than psychological factors. Han's interpretation is thus more depressing even than the most black-pilled school of Marxists.

Is The Burnout Society worth reading?

Yes, with reservations. Han's writing is beautiful and expressive. But at times, it reads more like a self-help book than serious critique.

The chapters are short and aphoristic. The remedies he points toward, such as "profound boredom" and adopting a "pedagogy of seeing," are things a reader can practice alone. Han presents them as restoring a balance between the active and the contemplative life. He ultimately offers individual answers (though mercifully, he does not call them "practices").

In this sense, Han reminds me of the later Heidegger, who, in a 1966 interview, despaired that “only a God can save us.” The book also aligns with All Things Shining (2011), published one year after The Burnout Society. There, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, reading the later Heidegger, lament the nihilism of a secular age and recommend a kind of craftsmanlike receptivity, cultivating the skill to notice meanings that are already present in shared practices.

In the post-political period before Occupy Wall Street, I found such projects persuasive. Without any viable left-wing electoral or revolutionary politics, the only option was to find meaning in small things or collaborate with like-minded people in small spaces you might seek to de-commodify. Many of my cohort were influenced by Michel de Certeau, who discussed the tactic of la perruque, or "the wig." You pretend to be a dutiful worker at your job, but you use the time to do your own subversive work. This is perhaps similar to "quiet quitting" in some ways, but I fear it worked better for public-sector jobs in France in the 1970s than it does now.

Some of my friends joined anarchist communes and attempted to live as if they were already free. I created a kind of co-op in Brooklyn with some friends that enabled us to manage ourselves while working just a few hours a day.

However, these solutions were rarely satisfying. Capital and the Bonapartist state will eventually spoil the fun. The City of New York, captured by lobbyists, raided and shut down our co-op. We won in court months later, but by then there was nothing to save. As for the wig, there will be a downturn, or a change in management or management style; the bosses will eventually smoke you out.

I find alternative explanations for widespread burnout and exhaustion more persuasive than Han's psychological account.

In their pamphlet The Coming Insurrection (2007). The Invisible Committee used the slogan: "We are not depressed; we're on strike." In 2018, France Unbowed introduced a bill in the French National Assembly to recognize burnout as an occupational disease, placing the burden of proof and the cost on employers. It was, of course, rejected by the Assembly.

Whatever one thinks of either response, both start from the premise that burnout has causes outside the person who suffers it or a nebulous cultural trend. Han's book never quite reaches that premise.

If I were to recommend this book, I would suggest it be read alongside Han's slightly richer Psychopolitics, Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics and Angela McRobbie's Be Creative (2016), as well as the collective work of Endnotes and The Invisible Committee, which cover similar ground with far more attention to institutions.

Sixteen years after its publication in Germany, the achievement-subject Han described is easy to recognize. An industry now surrounds it. But the material conditions that produced it, which Han hardly discussed, have become harsher. That is the real site of struggle, not in withdrawing to deliberate boredom as Han recommends.