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A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I loved a lot, called The Burnout Society. > The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) eve

A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I loved a lot, called The Burnout Society. > The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great. > We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly. He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in. There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final destination. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society

dfee 2y ago
Better link https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-soci...
- patcon 2y ago
  Best link? Maybe :) https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-society-9780804795098 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-...
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Thank you. I was short on time and didn’t see a good result quickly enough
bbor 2y ago
A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han. B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"
- peterldowns 2y ago
  For anyone interested in this book, I recommend also reading "Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology Of Supermodernity" by Marc Augé. He lays out an interesting argument that the stress and the anxiety of the modern world is due to a collapse of distance — informatically, geographically, and temporally. Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood. PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introduction_to_an_Anthropology_of_Supermodernity.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introd...
  - noirbot 2y ago
    That's very interesting - it aligns to something I've felt for a long time about the way the internet and modern media has made it so people just know about so many more things in the world and thus feel like they need to care about them. It's "eat your veggies because some starving African child doesn't even have that" but applied to everything, and juiced by live footage of a child dying of starvation. This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues. Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm hearing about the French government falling apart or the mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something bigger, worse, more important to the world going on somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also every part of you feels like you should do something.
    - peterldowns 2y ago
      Well said; I agree with you (and Augé). Another place I've seen this discussed is this fantastic blogpost on Scholar's Stage: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-the-ocracy/ https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-th... In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post: > In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too. > In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country. > When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part. > Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
evjan 2y ago
Thanks, just placed a hold on that book at my library!
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Nice, I hope you get a lot out of it! I found much of his thinking familiar in isolation, but appreciated how he put it all together under the umbrella of burnout. It changed my perspective substantially and opened my mind quite a bit regarding how I treat myself.

dfee 2y ago

Better link https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-soci...

patcon 2y ago
Best link? Maybe :) https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-society-9780804795098 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-...
steve_adams_86 2y ago
Thank you. I was short on time and didn’t see a good result quickly enough

bbor 2y ago

A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han. B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"

peterldowns 2y ago
For anyone interested in this book, I recommend also reading "Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology Of Supermodernity" by Marc Augé. He lays out an interesting argument that the stress and the anxiety of the modern world is due to a collapse of distance — informatically, geographically, and temporally. Simply put, the modern world feels bad because we're constantly engaging with information that we can't assimilate into a coherent model. In the past you could rely on simple and incorrect models of the world and generally be OK since your life was relatively local. Now, your life requires you to engage in a much larger sphere, one that is too large and changes too quickly to be understood. PDF: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introduction_to_an_Anthropology_of_Supermodernity.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introd...
- noirbot 2y ago
  That's very interesting - it aligns to something I've felt for a long time about the way the internet and modern media has made it so people just know about so many more things in the world and thus feel like they need to care about them. It's "eat your veggies because some starving African child doesn't even have that" but applied to everything, and juiced by live footage of a child dying of starvation. This also, I think, leads to detachment from local issues. Why should I look into who's on my city council when I'm hearing about the French government falling apart or the mayor of New York doing crimes? There's always something bigger, worse, more important to the world going on somewhere and there's nothing you can do about it, but also every part of you feels like you should do something.
  - peterldowns 2y ago
    Well said; I agree with you (and Augé). Another place I've seen this discussed is this fantastic blogpost on Scholar's Stage: https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-the-ocracy/ https://scholars-stage.org/the-problem-isnt-the-merit-its-th... In the post, Tanner Greer excerpts from Andrew Yang's book The War on Normal People — here's the relevant quote in full, but I recommend clicking through and reading the whole post: > In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too. > In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country. > When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part. > Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.

evjan 2y ago

Thanks, just placed a hold on that book at my library!

steve_adams_86 2y ago
Nice, I hope you get a lot out of it! I found much of his thinking familiar in isolation, but appreciated how he put it all together under the umbrella of burnout. It changed my perspective substantially and opened my mind quite a bit regarding how I treat myself.