Self-Exploitation

Why do so many people, in an age of unprecedented freedom, fall ill from exhaustion, depression, and anxiety? The most influential answer in recent philosophy comes from Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959), a South Korean philosopher based in Germany, author of a series of short, aphoristic books that have become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. His central thesis is disconcerting: we fall ill not from an excess of repression but from an excess of positivity — from the compulsion to be able, to produce, and to perform that we turn against ourselves. This article reconstructs that diagnosis. ...