This Is How To Overcome Burnout: 5 Secrets From Philosophy

It’s a Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing you’re supposed to be doing. No deadline looming.

But there’s a voice in your head: “You should be accomplishing something.” Who is that voice? Where the heck is it coming from?

A philosopher named Byung-Chul Han has a theory…

There was a time when society’s main job was saying sit down, shut up, get in line, and good God, don’t touch that. Han calls this the disciplinary society. That world hasn’t totally vanished, but it’s largely been replaced. We now live in what he calls the achievement society.

Under the old rules, if you failed, you failed against a standard outside yourself. In the achievement society, the accusation isn’t “You were disobedient.” It’s “You were inadequate.” You didn’t live up to your potential.

The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.

Burnout’s framed as a private weakness: a mismatch between your coping ability and your workload. In other words: your fault. Hold on a sec, it gets worse…

In a disciplinary society, it’s easy to spot the oppressor. The factory owner. The state. You could revolt. But now you’re the boss and the worker: you can’t exactly stage an uprising against yourself. What’re you gonna do, stand outside your home with a sign that says DOWN WITH ME? Self-exploitation works because it feels like freedom. Nobody’s forcing you, which makes it more efficient than any external boss ever was.

When you’re your own enemy, what you get is depression and burnout. Instead of the disciplinary society’s “Thou Shalt Not,” the achievement society whispers “But You Could Be So Much More…”

How do we handle this?

We’ll be getting some answers from Byung-Chul Han’s “The Burnout Society.”

Let’s get to it…

 

See The Invisible Boss

The voice whispers, “Shouldn’t you be doing something useful?”

That voice is what I call “the invisible boss.” We’ve internalized the values of the achievement society.

This situation deserves analysis, not just mockery. Okay, it also deserves mockery, because the whole thing is absurd. We’ve built a world in which sitting on a couch can feel like you’ve accidentally committed embezzlement against your future.

If a man with a clipboard appeared in my home every time I sat down and said, “Excuse me, can you justify this rest period?” I would hit him with a saucepan. I would become a true-crime podcast in like thirty seconds. But because the voice comes from inside my own head, I treat it like maturity.

Ambition is good. Conscientiousness is good. But they can get out of hand. The common-sense view, the one we humans somehow keep missing despite having been issued brains for generations, is that nobody can live under perpetual internal audit without eventually losing their mind.

The answer? I’d say it’s cognitive defusion. Instead of obeying the invisible boss every time it pipes up, just notice it. Say, “There’s that thought again.” Then ask: “Is this my desire, or is this just the achievement society doing its ventriloquist act?” You won’t always know. That’s okay. You weren’t going to get perfect self-knowledge out of a Thursday evening anyway.

The point is to disrupt reflexive obedience. Hear the thought. Name it. Don’t obey immediately. Maybe you still choose to work. No problem. But it’s now a choice instead of a reflex.

When the voice in your head says, “You should be productive,” maybe for once answer: Says who?

(To learn more about how to deal with that negative voice in your head, click here.)

The invisible boss is tamed. But the phone is still pinging…

 

Hyperactivity Is The Most Passive Thing You Can Do

The busier you are, the less free you probably are. These days our lives are often unbroken chains of reaction. A ping, a reply. A request, a yes.

Deciding never enters into it. Han calls this “hyperactivity.”

Hyperactivity looks like power from a distance, kinda like the way a hamster wheel looks like transportation from a distance. But hyperactivity is passive. It lacks a decision. Freedom is the ability to choose: to say no.

Stressful as it is, urgency can feel like relief because you don’t have to decide. If you’re rushed, you must be important. But the busiest person in the room isn’t always the most engaged. Sometimes they’re just the most obedient.

The radical act here can be a calm, firm “no.” No, I won’t reply to that immediately. No, I won’t attend this pointless thing. We have a culture where somebody with boundaries is seen as a psychopath. Leave an email until tomorrow and you may as well have sent back a severed finger.

So practice the pause. Before every reactive yes, insert a gap. Then ask the forbidden question: do I really want to?

Yeah, yeah, it’s not always realistic to say no. You can’t drop all your obligations. You’ll still have bills, family, deadlines, the whole circus. There’s no magical scenario of total freedom unless you’re willing to fake your own death, and even then I assume somebody will find a way to email you about it.

Delay is a kind of sovereignty.

Now that’s a truly magnificent sentence because it sounds a heck of a lot more regal than the real behavior, which is probably just leaving a text unanswered while you recline on the couch still wearing yesterday’s T-shirt.

But the principle rings true. Delay reminds you that your brain isn’t a help desk. You can acknowledge the world without immediately obeying it.

(To learn a bomb-disposal expert’s secrets to staying calm under pressure, click here.)

All this is great, but how do you actually relax?

 

Stop Treating Rest As A Productivity Hack

You can’t just do something for the heck of it anymore. Everything has to file a claim. Sleep gets rebranded as “recovery.” Walking is “hitting your step goal.” Leisure’s tolerated only as a means of prolonging service life: “Take some time off so you come back refreshed.”

Everything needs the words “in order to.” Sleep in order to work. Work in order to earn. Earn in order to maintain your life… so you can continue working. You’re not living; you’re managing a supply chain.

If rest requires a return on investment, it’s not really rest. Rest shouldn’t be valuable just because it makes you better at work. That’s an accidental side effect, like getting exercise while sprinting out of a burning building.

Rest is valuable because it belongs to the part of life that’s not for sale. (Yes, there is one.) A moment when your existence isn’t focused on serving some next step.

This is why the Sabbath concept is useful as a secular practice. A day that does not exist to fortify tomorrow. A day that simply is. So designate a Sabbath for yourself. Do some stuff that has no justification attached. No “in order to.” Rest with zero explanation. And zero guilt.

(To learn more about creating a secular Sabbath, click here.)

Downtime is nice but when things slow down, won’t you get bored?

 

Boredom Is Not Wasted Time

When was the last time you were bored?

No, I mean actual boredom. Doctor’s-office-waiting-room-with-no-phone boredom.

If you can’t remember, that’s the point. Waiting for coffee? Email. Driving? Audiobook. Taking a shower? Waterproof speaker, because apparently I can no longer be alone with my own thoughts without a man from NPR explaining inflation to me.

Of course we’re exhausted. Mental stillness is now totally suspicious, like you’ve joined a cult or are about to write poetry, both of which the world eyes with understandable alarm.

Somewhere along the line, boredom started being seen as an emergency, like a gas leak or a suspicious mole. So we colonized every pocket of emptiness. My brain used to have a few open lots. Now it’s all luxury condos and chain pharmacies. A child says, “I’m bored,” and adults respond like he said he’s got blood in his urine. Quick, find a screen! God forbid a kid spend five minutes staring at some clouds and accidentally invent a world.

The mind needs some room. Research shows that the brain is doing important stuff even when it seems idle. Connecting ideas. Simulating possible futures. Stapling bits of your life together to create meaning. And every time you respond to a dull moment with summary execution, you’re interrupting the process that gives rise to creativity, self-reflection, and insight.

Boredom’s where feelings catch up with you. Your brain notices that the thing you’ve been calling “busyness” is really loneliness or grief. But it’s much more pleasant to listen to a podcast host explain naval warfare than to listen to your own mind say, “By the way, you’ve been unhappy for six months.”

Look, I’d like to tell you I’m a person who loves silence and the blossoming of his inner life, but that’d be a lie so absurd it’d burst into flames halfway out of my mouth. I’ve taken walks that were little more than a system for transporting podcasts from one side of the neighborhood to the other. I’ve scrolled on my phone while waiting for the microwave to beep, which is a sentence that should disqualify me from having opinions. Still, even from inside the madhouse, you can see the madhouse.

So, crazy as it sounds, schedule some boredom. Three times a week, twenty minutes. No phone. No goals. No music. No podcast. No hidden agenda like “I’ll use the time to brainstorm.”

And, yeah, first time you do it, you’ll feel insane. Your mind will start feverishly reviewing its to-do list. You’ll get an overwhelming urge to Google whether octopuses can recognize jazz. Don’t give in. That’s just what happens when the machine finally starts powering down.

(To learn the upside of boredom and how to use it, click here.)

And finally we have the big question that faces us all in Han’s achievement society…

 

Why Nothing You Do Ever Feels Like Enough

Things used to have the decency to end. A meal ended. A football game ended.

Now? Fewer things have that satisfying thunk of finality. So much of life is an endless stream of updates, emails, and infinite scroll. We exist in the forever-almost. Han says we’re lacking “conclusive forms.” Things that have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Things you can point to and say, “That’s done.”

Because “enough” is a word that only makes sense when there’s an ending. And if there’s no clear ending, your brain never gets the reward of closure. It still wants the very primitive satisfaction of being done. Caveman brain say: Hunt over. Fire lit. Danger gone. Task complete.

So create endings. I talked about this in the work-life balance chapter of my first book. You need to choose what’s enough for you. Draw a line. The world ain’t gonna do it for you. No way. The world will keep every tab open forever if you let it.

So build “conclusive forms” into your life deliberately. Ship the thing. Call it done.

(To learn the uncomfortable reason you keep self-sabotaging, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up. Umm, and then I have a confession to make…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to overcome burnout…

• See The Invisible Boss: The voice telling you to do more is not always your conscience. Observe the thought instead of instantly obeying it.
• Hyperactivity Is The Most Passive Thing You Can Do: A packed calendar is one of the best places to hide from your life.
• Stop Treating Rest As A Productivity Hack: Rest does not need to justify itself by making you a better worker. I don’t say, “I’m overwhelmed.” I say, “I’m struggling with bandwidth.” Excuse me, what am I, a router?
• Boredom Is Not Wasted Time: Stop killing every idle moment. Let yourself get a little bored.
• Why Nothing You Do Ever Feels Like Enough: No complex organism can thrive in permanent open-endedness. Maybe management consultants can. But not human beings.

So here’s the part where I clear my throat awkwardly…

Uhh, I may be part of the problem here. Yes. Me. The guy writing a blog that often says things like “7 ways to be more productive” and “Here’s how to stop wasting time.” I may have unintentionally been the ghostwriter for the invisible boss.

(That sound you just heard was Byung-Chul Han vomiting.)

Mea culpa.

Balance is the answer, as it is to nearly everything. Use the productivity tips the way you’d use a hammer: pick it up, build something, put it down. Don’t clutch the hammer at dinner. Don’t bring the hammer to your kid’s birthday party.

The burned-out person says, “I need a better system,” and sometimes they do. But often what they need even more is a protected space where the system isn’t allowed to enter.

We don’t have to throw away the tools. We need to stop sleeping in the toolbox. I’ll keep writing about productivity and better ways to live, because apparently this is the little circus tent I was born to sweep. But the asterisk under all of it should be this: don’t become so efficient at administering your life that you forget to have one.

Han says we’ve forgotten how to end things. Fine. So allow me to hand you an ending, free of charge.

Blog post is over. You finished it. There aren’t any action items. No 30-day challenge. Go rest. Not because you’ve earned it.

Because you never had to.