Currently, self-demand prevents us from enjoying ourselves because we’re more focused on producing than resting. The burnout society Here we see the final inversion of the object-subject relationship. If it was previously commonplace to believe that your material reality, your community, your economic status helped shape your identity, now this relationship is turned upside down. It’s you who determines your material reality and your economic status. The subject creates his own reality. Han writes: “the society of achievement and activeness is generating excessive tiredness and exhaustion.” Jeffries, Stuart (2017-12-30). "Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han – review". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-01-09. The violence [ Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer “viral.” Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenomenon. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defense, but to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation—when too much exists—do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive from immunological negativity. Baudrillard’s theory of power [ Gewalt] is riddled with leaps of argument and vague definitions because it attempts to describe the violence of positivity—or, in other words, the violence of the Same when no Otherness is involved—in immunological terms. Thus he writes:

Brazilian Portuguese edition: Hegel e o Poder: Um ensaio sobre amabilidade, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2022 ISBN 9786557134214. Secular, 21st-century residents of wealthy countries don’t worry much about whether we’re God’s elect. But we’re still trapped in the Calvinist cage. We are anxious to demonstrate to potential employers, and to ourselves, that we are work saints. Like divine election, this type of status is an abstract condition that we cannot assign to ourselves, but one we hope others will recognize.The issue he brought for the readers is that none of these specific diseases today is an infection. These are diseases caused by an excess of positivity and, for that very reason, no immunological technique proves effective to combat them.

Depression is also a symptom of the burnout society. The achievement subject suffers burnout at the moment it is no longer able “to be able.” It fails to meet its self-imposed demand to achieve. No longer being able “to be able” leads to destructive self-recrimination and auto-aggression. The achievement subject wages a war against itself and perishes in it. Victory in this war against oneself is called burnout. To question burnout isn’t to deny the scale of suffering, or the many ravages of the pandemic: despair, bitterness, fatigue, boredom, loneliness, alienation, and grief—especially grief. To question burnout is to wonder what meaning so baggy an idea can possibly hold, and whether it can really help anyone shoulder hardship. Burnout is a metaphor disguised as a diagnosis. It suffers from two confusions: the particular with the general, and the clinical with the vernacular. If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just . . . the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage—if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies—then it raises a historical question. What started it? The dialectic of Being-Active, which escapes Arendt, is that the hyperactive intensification of activity turns this into a Hyper-Passivity, in which we helplessly follow every impulse and stimulus. Instead of freedom, it brings forth new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that the more active we become, the freer we are. Brazilian Portuguese edition: Capitalismo e impulso de morte, Vozes, Petrópolis, 2021 ISBN 9786557131282.A. Big data is only a very primitive form of knowledge, namely correlation: if A happens, then B happens. There is no understanding. Artificial intelligence does not think. Artificial intelligence doesn’t get goosebumps.