Why You Should Give Up on Your Dreams
Subjectivity under Byung-Chul Han’s achievement-society
“The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.”
— Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings
Dear reader,
An editor’s note:
This is an experimental piece as it’s an edited transcript of a video essay I made. I hope it’s nonetheless a tolerable reading experience. In any case, you could always watch the video if you prefer that medium.
In this essay, I’ll explore what it’s like to be an individual or, put theoretically, a subject under capitalism through the lens of psychoanalysis and critical theory, using the ideas of Slavoj Žižek and, more importantly, Byung-Chul Han. So when I claim, I admit provocatively, ‘Why you should give up on your dreams,’ I’m not talking about existential projects, far from it. In fact, the tragedy of living under capitalism is that very few people have such projects and vocations that existentially move them. Most people instead have either jobs or careers for basic survival or careerism, respectively; a more apt title to explore subjectivity under capitalism would’ve been ‘Why you should not have to have dreams.’ That would make a lousy title; therefore, I’m stating provocatively, ‘Why you should give up on your dreams.’ But to reiterate, I’m not talking about having dreams, extensional projects, aspirations, ideals, etc. Instead, I’m saying we should try and rid ourselves of the pressure to have the category of dreams, as such, the category that relentlessly compels us to achieve—a statement that connects to everything I’ll be exploring, mainly through Han’s critical work in The Burnout Society. The thesis I’ll be arguing for is that because our society—meaning, our cultural and psycho-social reality that gives our lives meaning—constantly inundates us with the imposition to achieve, have dreams, goals, aspirations, etc., we live in a society of toxic hyper-positivity; all of these commandments to achieve is harming and making us lesser humans. Theoretically, I’ll explore the trauma brought upon human subjectivity in neoliberal society using the concepts of burnout that Han has outlined and then the now rather famous Žižekian idea that ‘Enjoy!’ IS superego.
Firstly, what is burnout? We know at a colloquial level what burnout entails; generally, it’s when you’re inundated with work, tired from working incessantly, and then suddenly, you crash; you crash both physically and mentally, feeling depleted and drained even at a spiritual level—a colloquialism describing the latter phenomena is existential dread. And so burnout is usually treated purely as a mental health phenomenon, to use a voguish term imbued from personal lifestyle choices. But Han outlines that no, it is more sociological than individual; burnout is a symptom of a deep-rooted cultural malady of excess positivity. And so it has to be analysed at this level:
Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien. [...] Depression, ADHD, and burnout syndrome point to excess positivity. Burnout syndrome occurs when the ego overheats, which follows from too much of the Same. The hyper in hyperactivity is not an immunological category. It represents the massification of the positive. (The Burnout Society, pp.1-9)
Ostensible mental health conditions such as burnout syndrome, ADHD or depression aren’t solely psychological phenomena. They have to be analyzed and theorized on different layers, both individual and social, so it has to be a multi-layered analysis taking into account how our social reality affects our individual selfhood. And that’s what I will do in this essay, focusing more on what our culture does to us rather than purely treating these subjective states as some lifestyle or mental health issue. The notion is quite simple: the reason we see so much excess depression, ADHD burnout or whatever symptomatic terminology we use to describe such phenomena has very little to do with individual decisions but a lot more to do with our sociocultural reality that constitutes our subjectivity; these symptoms are imbued by subjects living in what Han calls the achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]:
The late-modern achievement-subject is subject to no one. In fact, it is no longer a subject in the etymological sense (subject to, sujet à). It positivizes itself; indeed, it liberates itself into a project. However, the change from subject to project does not make power or violence disappear. Auto-compulsion, which presents itself as freedom, takes the place of allo-compulsion. This development is closely connected to capitalist relations of production. Starting at a certain level of production, auto-exploitation is significantly more efficient and brings much greater returns [leistungsstärker] than allo-exploitation, because the feeling of freedom attends it. Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself. (Ibid., pp. 46-47)
As a leftist, I don’t want to play the good old Marxist game of blaming anything and everything on capitalism. But it unequivocally is the case that achievement society is a product of neoliberal capitalist ideology—it’s, of course, not only a plain materialistic economic product of capitalism but has more to do with the complex ideological web structuring such a society where human beings themselves are viewed as nothing more than agents of capital and solely existing for the promulgation of ideologies.
A culture becomes an achievement society when there’s an excess of positivity and an absence of negativity; there isn’t a place for No. While such a society doesn’t allow negativity, even any residue of it is turned around to hold positive meaning, a phenomenon exemplified in self-help books like ‘The Obstacle Is the Way’ by modern-Stoics like Ryan Holiday or garish consumerist slogans that hijack morally good messages of tenacity and hard work to make you consume more, e.g. Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ trademark.
“It positivises itself; indeed, it liberates itself into a project” is an important line: this notion is quintessentially exemplified in the self-help culture of health and wellness fanaticism, where people are obsessed with turning themselves into a project and optimising themselves into the best version of whatever they are as a self. And this kind of self-optimisation or, in the more capitalist sense, self-exploitation, that is, you become an entrepreneur of the self, an independent business owner as MLMs package the message, etc., becomes the end in itself. We start viewing ourselves as pure, bare machines that must be optimised and made the best versions of, which doesn’t exist. But the inexistence is the point; it IS why we constantly want to become better, richer, fitter, happier, etc. This unquenchable thirst and unfillable emptiness in the modern human perfectly fuels global capitalism. But nowadays, the pernicious ideologies are harder to recognise on the surface because it’s a lot more holistic; it’s ‘capitalism with a human face,’ so to speak, conspicuous in New Ageism that demands you to read self-help books, meditate, attend wellness boot camps and fully self-actualise. Isn’t it unsurprising that we see some of the best-selling books to be ones on health and wellness or self-help books on personal finance, and the most listened to podcasts are all personal development ones or those from the, let’s say, Andrew Huberman Lab model, where you’re inundated with health tips and tricks on how to optimise your body much like a mechanical machine? But in such an achievement culture, we will inevitably fail because what we seek doesn’t exist. In fact, this failure itself is what keeps us wanting for more; it’s an objet petit a, to use Lacanian jargon. The ideal version of yourself or the fully optimised human body is a fantasy that we’re chasing. And so this chase leads to burnout syndrome, depression and ADHD because, at one point, the individual burns out by excess positivity and the unyielding demands to be the best version of themself.
Having said that, I hope not to mislead you by using terms such as self-exploitation, auto-exploitation, auto-compulsion, auto-optimisation, etc. Han nor I am stating that the individual alone can be blamed for this phenomena. We can’t just say, “Take responsibility for yourself and figure it out on your own; learn to relax more, don’t exploit yourself, etc.” Studying Han’s work clearly shows he’s doing his analysis at a cultural level, which is why he calls it the achievement society. While the symptoms manifest individually, he’s explicitly stating that we need to view this toxic positivity at a structural level; he calls it the systemic violence imposed on human subjects living in a social reality of being forced to achieve:
It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. [...] It is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labour society. (Ibid., pp. 10-11)
So, at first, we are misled into believing burnout syndrome is an individual pathology. But further analysis shows it has much more to do with the achievement culture that makes an individual sick, destroys selfhood, and harms human subjectivity. It isn’t restrictions nor an excess of responsibility in a traditional society where a person has duties and moral obligations that make us sick, but the obstinate imperative to achieve! The commandments of late modern society are that you must be an entrepreneur of yourself, dream big, be the best version of yourself, etc. And indeed, if these unmeetable demands aren’t met, we feel guilty for our sins and eventually burn out; this connects with Žižek’s notion that Freud is not dead in our times but is perhaps most pertinent to our zeitgeist because “Enjoy!” is the superego imperative:
The traditional notion of psychoanalysis is that because of some inner obstacles you’ve internalised and identified excessively with paternal or other social prohibitions, you cannot set yourself free to enjoy; pleasure is not accessible to you. It is accessible to you only in pathological forms of feeling guilty and so on. So, the idea is psychoanalysis allows you to suspend and overcome these internalised prohibitions so that it enables you to enjoy. The problem today is that the commandment of the ruling ideology is to enjoy; in different ways, it can be sexual enjoyment, consumption, commodity enjoyment up to spiritual enjoyment, realising yourself, whatever. And I think that the problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy, but the problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy! (Žižek!, 2005)
Superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and meet its demands. [...] For Lacan, superego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned.”: superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. (How to Read Lacan, pp. 80-81)
In an achievement society, it’s this superego imperative to ‘enjoy!’ that we can never fulfil that makes us feel guilty. But it’s also because of this psychoanalytical reality that the superego isn’t what was traditionally viewed as being a Godly or patriarchal father figure telling us right from wrong; rather, it’s an anti-ethical agency that wants us to transgress and keeps condemning us for not transgress enough and for failing to be solipsistic, narcissistic individuals—and unsurprisingly we become tired of having to be ourselves. So Han is correct in that ultimately, all human subjects that partake in achievement society have no choice but to end up with forms of burnout, ADHD and depression. But we need the Freudo-Lacanian-Žižekian superego to understand the psychical violence done to subjects in a society of hyper-positivity. Perhaps a more perspicacious way to understand subjectivity in an achievement society is by juxtaposing it with a more traditional, prohibitive one Michel Foucault would call a disciplinary society:
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of “control society” do justice to this change. It still contains too much negativity.
Disciplinary society is a society of negativity. It is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The negative modal verb that governs it is May Not. By the same token, the negativity of compulsion adheres to Should. Achievement society, more and more, is in the process of discarding negativity. Increasing deregulation is abolishing it. Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society. Its plural form—the affirmation, “Yes, we can”—epitomizes achievement society’s positive orientation. Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers. (The Burnout Society, pp.8-9)
In an elementary philosophical sense, the superego could be viewed through the Kantian categorical imperative, which manifests in unconditioned principles that we must leave aside our desires and follow—religiously speaking, these would be the absolute divine commandments of God. The superego acts similarly; we always feel we need to please the superego because it constantly haunts us, saying our efforts are not enough. In disciplinary society, this may come as guilt for committing sin, e.g., adultery, buggery, lack of piety or other (mostly sexual) prohibitions of traditional times. And in an achievement society, our guilt still remains because the superego doesn't go away. The categorical imperative or religious commandments, let's say, take on different content while the form nevertheless remains, i.e. now it says you must have initiatives, you must have projects, you must have dreams and so on. The same guilt that the subject under disciplinary society had for not pleasing the superego is experienced (perhaps more perniciously) by all of us in achievement society. In that vein - I partially disagree with Han when he states that psychoanalysis can't explain what it's like to be a human subject in an achievement society due to its lack of prohibition:
Psychoanalysis presupposes the negativity of repression and negation. The unconscious and repression, Freud stresses, are ‘correlative’ to the greatest extent. In contrast, the process of repression or negation plays no role in contemporary psychic maladies such as depression, burnout, and ADHD. Instead, they indicate an excess of positivity, that is, not negation so much as the inability to say no; they do not point to not-being-allowed-to-do-anything [NichtDürfen], but to being-able-to-do-everything [Alles-Können]. Therefore, psychoanalysis offers no way of approaching these phenomena. Depression is not a consequence of repression that stems from instances of domination such as the superego. Nor does depression permit ‘transference,’ which offers indirect signs of what has been repressed. (Ibid., p. 41)
Indeed, repression doesn’t act the same way for subjects in achievement society as it would have in the past. But when we start viewing the superego not as an ethical agency per se but rather as the Lacanian anti-ethical one, as the agency that bullies us when we don’t fulfil the demands of the “higher ideals” of permissive hyperactive society, we realise it’s that same haunting guilt of the prohibitive superego that leads to burnout, ADHD and depression. While the symptom is different, the cause is similar, at least in form. Accordingly, I’d argue we most certainly can explain modern human subjectivity using psychoanalysis, perhaps better than any other contemporary practice or therapeutic technique, especially because of its theoretical delineation of the superego.
So, leaving theory aside—although I’m not implying theory isn’t important; it’s not something abstract and detached from our everyday life as caricatured by contemporary ideologies; quite the contrary, theory in our times is what’s most important to understand our reality—why am I saying you should give up on your dreams? If it’s not obvious already, I’m not saying having dreams is bad or that you should feel guilty for having goals and aspirations, certainly not; unfortunately, I’d argue that it’s only in capitalist society people are made feel guilty if whatever hobbies, vocations or existential projects they have don’t align with the capitalist modes of production: for instance, if you let’s say have a knitting hobby the question you’d usually get asked is where’s your Etsy? Or where’s your online store? Why haven’t you turned this into a business?—meaning if you haven’t become an entrepreneur and converted your hobby into a business, you’re made to feel guilty as if you’re doing something wrong by not carrying out the duties of achievement society. So it’s the category of dreams we should give up as ‘having to have’ dreams or having to achieve and always be your best version will destroy your subjectivity and make you a miserable and lesser of a person.
Theoretical texts are rarely prescriptive; generally, they do a socio-cultural analysis or critique. But in this essay, I will use theory and be prescriptive: if you don’t have dreams, if you don’t have goals, if you want to travel around, live aimlessly and be for the sake of being, that’s fine. You don’t have to be guilty about being nonchalant. Having said that, though, if you view our lives through psychoanalysis, you’d see we will inevitably feel guilty because we cannot step outside of our socio-symbolic reality and subjectivity. But one could hope that at least studying theory and philosophy helps us to be aware of this datum and understand the reasons for our guilt.