Concerning Burnout, Idleness, and Acceleration
From Philosophy to AI and Swiping Right
Though not professionally trained I have always been a philosophical thinker. Cutting my teeth on Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test at the age of 18 I have always been drawn to Philosophy. This post will be going down that philosophy hole.
As a prerequisite I highly recommend watching “We’re Burned Out. Here’s Why” by Jared Henderson below. As a subscriber myself I also highly recommend giving his Substack a read here.
June 2014. From the jump out of college straight into the workforce my first professional job consisted of 10 keying information into an AS400 terminal. I remember thinking “a degree in economics to 10 key data?” Do not get me wrong I was thankful for the 8 month opportunity and grateful for the newfound flow of money. It was however mind numbing. I could tell something was wrong about this arrangement. I could not pinpoint it. After 10 years of this ephemeral feeling coming and going and the past year of finally wrapping my head around it, I have it settled.
I am burnt out. So is everyone else.
The average human always worked but something happened someplace in the past handful of decades where burnout slowly crept up on us. Shortly after having my personal revelation about burnout Jared Henderson posted his video to YouTube (shared above). Embracing the synchronicity I watched almost immediately on its release and bought the book “The Burnout Society" by philosopher Byung-Chul Han to dive deeper. Only now can I say I found the time (ironic?) to read through this small but dense book and write an essay on not just the book but burnout and idelness in general.
The key argument in the book as well as my revelation is that burnout is not simply exhaustion. It is not where one is ‘a little more worn down every day and one only needs an extra long weekend or vacation to recoup.’
Han identified a few key characteristics of what is happening. In my own life and understanding:
The illusion of unlimited possibility and thus unlimited positivity
The loss of our ability to say no and set boundaries
Hyperactivity and multitasking
The disappearance of contemplative life
In our society of constant achievement, constant growth, hustle culture, and big line go up, we are all transfixed on this illusion of unlimited potential and unlimited positives. We have excess positivity. In a ‘world where anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard enough’ they unintentionally may adopt a negative. (“I am clearly not working hard enough so I must work harder and face burnout”, “I am working as hard as I can but I am not getting ahead. I must be a broken and depressed human.”, “I must constantly be optimizing my life but I cannot intensely focus on anything of substance. I must have ADHD.”)
In our loss of ability to say no and set boundaries I am quite guilty of this. To me everything is a litmus test to prove my worth. To show I am a good human (humble?) being who is valuable, my personality has taken on a ‘yes man’ attitude. For those unaware a yes man or yes person “always agrees with a superior, often to gain approval or avoid conflict. This term is usually used in a negative context to describe someone who lacks independent thought.” Ouch, thanks Merriam Webster. Good people never say no… do they?
With hyperactivity and multitasking we are always doing multiple things at once, never fully focused on one thing. We all have met that type A who seems to be constantly trying to optimize every facet of their life (I still do not think I am type A but my wife begs to differ). This is what Han defines as hyperactivity. After a small misfire in my mind it makes perfect sense. People (apparently like me) are constantly trying to achieve, constantly trying to fit it all in, constantly trying to read the right books to optimize output and outcomes. People who play videogames call this ‘min maxing’ where one hyper optimizes their traits in a game, takes full advantage of multiplier effects, as well as attempts to minimize downtime, negate negative traits, effects, and outcomes for that perfect build. This is hyperactivity at its core. No we all do not have ADHD we all are simply running around thinking our heads are cut off.
As for multitasking, no. You are not good at multitasking, I am not good at multitasking. No one is good at multitasking. Let me know if you would like more of my thoughts on multitasking as I could write a whole post on it. We all know smart phones already tear our fleeting time and attention away from family and friends. In the back of our heads we know that some Lord in Silicon Valley is making money off of our attention and worsening myopia. We nonchalantly say “yeah yeah great that’s fine” to our child while we play candycrush after she asked if you can cut the crust off her sandwich. You rate her lower than your phone and she is unconsciously being conditioned to think that. We cannot even take our eyes off the screen to drive safetly. I get much more done in a day when I get into a ‘hyperfocus zen flow state’ I am sure you do too.
In this world of boundless positivity (“you can do it!”, “no limits"!”, “hustle harder!”) actually leads to mental health problems like depression and burnout. It’s like we are trapped in a cycle of endless self improvement. This drive for constant achievement is tying our self worth to our productivity and that is dangerous. For myself pressures are not just coming from work and my manager but from within. There is an internal voice pushing me to prove myself. It is a form of self imposed pressure that can be harder to resist than external demands. In college I had this motto “treading water is the same as drowning”. While it is a powerful statement it suggests that merely existing, merely being is not enough. There is implied violence in that metaphor, ‘if you are not actively moving forward, you are dying’. That is an exhausting way to live. Only recently has my perspective finally started to shift on this. I am becoming more aware of how this mindset affects me which is also the first step in changing it.
Slowly I am moving from an achievement driven mindset to questioning the fundamental assumptions behind it. In this ‘rat race’ is there even a cheese at the end? What does the end look like? Why have I been running without even knowing what I am running toward?
Jared Henderson brings us up to speed about how the ancients praised idleness. As an untrained lover of Philosophy I have always heard about this essay "In Praise of Idleness" by philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his 1935 essay Russell argues that the belief in the virtue of work causes harm and that a reduction in work hours could lead to greater happiness and prosperity. Interesting and on subject. I acquired that too (currently in queue to read). Quick skim I saw some pieces on critiquing Capitalism and Communism, maybe I can dovetail Economics into Philosophy after all? Speaking of Economics shieldmaidenpdx in here recent post new-year-new-things-to-think-about introduces me to Thorsten Veblen. How did I miss this great thinker before? He coined the term ‘Conspicuous Leisure’ where conspicuous or visible leisure is excercised by the upper class to display social status.
Between Han, Russel, and Veblen there is a common thread about how our society has warped both work and leisure. We have somehow managed to turn even our ‘downtime’ into performance well as a performance. Where this performance of both is something to be optimized and shown off. You can see this in how people feel pressured to have productive hobbies or turn their leisure activities into side hustles. This connects into how Han talks about the importance of his term “profound boredom” where we should not engage in the scrolling through social media but that we should instead strive toward a state that allows for genuine contemplation. Russel also suggests that we bring more into the world through our idleness not our work.
This brings me to the modern day. AI was promised to liberate us from tedious work and create more space for contemplation or ‘productive idleness’ a la Russel. Instead it is being coopted by the acheivement society as yet another optimization tool. AI is essentially accelerating the very burnout cycle Han critiques. This reminds me how early 20th century economists predicted that technological advances would lead to a shorter workweek. Even President Richard Nixon proposed legislation to reduce the workweek to 4 days instead of 5. Instead we have found ways to fill the time saved by technology with even more work. We seem to be trapped in what Han may call a ‘productivity paradox’ where the more efficient we become, the more we are expected to produce.
AI not creating more ‘idle time’ connects with the Veblen concept of leisure too. When AI does free up time there is pressure to use that time for more ‘productive’ pursuits rather than genuine leisure or contemplation. Society in general has infinite capacity to absorb and redirect efficieny gains back into more production. More what? How we implement AI in our work lives matters. If we are not conscious about it AI could end up intensifying rather than alleviating burnout, depression, mania, and other mental ills. Perhaps we need to think about not how AI can make us more efficeint but how it could help create spaces for meaningful pause and reflection. I can guarantee that the higher castes in society are enjoying their idle time, you should too.
AI was not the first piece of technology coopted to increase production. Democratization of technology through the use of the mouse and graphical user interfaces has served as a subtle form to seduce its user into deeper integration through convenience and accessibility. Today computer scientists and software engineers at the leading tech companies are more focused on the GUI (graphical user interface), a trade off between understanding and accessibility. When one is writing, typing, or reading here is a level of contemplation and understanding that is required. Wtih GUIs that contemplative element is often replaced with what Han may call ‘hyperattention’, or quick serface level interactions that prioritize speed over depth. Even children with the ‘swipe’ gesture has become instinctual, creating what we may call a ‘technological habitus’ from an extremely early age. This early integration with technology is not neutral. It is training for future participation in the infinite acheivement society. Early preparation of our children to be ‘acheivement subjects’ before they can even read. All of these are no longer seen as tools anymore, they are extensions that orient us toward constant productivity and acheivement rather than contemplation, understanding, and simply living.
My old motto of ‘treading water is the same as drowing’ is dead. Going forward my motto is ‘I am enough. I do enough. I have enough’. I have worth regardless of acheivement and so do you. This is the first long(ish) form post I have posted on Substack. I hope you enjoyed. I also hope that you (and I) can find that inner balance to recover from burnout culture while achieving productive idleness.