I have said to my own children many times: don’t put yourself under so much pressure. They invariably point back at me and my habits, and also their friends’ habits, and the competitive systems we all swim in. It’s a sharp response — and a perceptive one. What looks like a personal struggle, they seem to understand instinctively, is also located in our social structures.
It’s an issue worth sitting with. As parents and educators, we spend considerable energy asking how much pressure we should be putting on the young people in our care. We ask it less often the other way around: why do they put so much pressure on themselves? And why do we? Korean philosopher Han Byung-Chul has a clarifying and genuinely uncomfortable answer. In The Burnout Society, he argues that modern societies have shifted from being disciplinary — enforcing conformity through external institutions like schools, factories, hospitals, prisons — to being achievement societies, where the enforcement has moved inward. The architecture is different: fitness studios, open-plan offices, financial institutions, progressive schools, social media. But the logic is the same. Systems of power still depend on individuals internalising their place within them. We have simply moved, in his terms, from being obedience-subjects to achievement-subjects.
The crucial difference is that no one is making us do it anymore. We do it to ourselves — freely, voluntarily, and even with considerable enthusiasm. In the language of our moment, we are all entrepreneurs of ourselves. Sociologist Helmut Rosa captures what this looks like in practice: paramedics attending to people who have collapsed, who refuse to go directly to hospital because they have urgent matters at the office, and who demand their laptops once admitted to the clinic. I read that and felt the discomfort of recognition.
Han’s conclusion is stark: Disciplinary societies produce madmen and criminals. Achievement societies produce depressives and losers. The psychiatrist Alain Ehrenberg reaches a similar place: depression’s rise maps almost precisely onto the cultural shift from fixed social roles and inherited obligations to the demand that each of us become ourselves — take initiative, fulfil our potential, live up to the person we could be, become our full authentic selves.
I find that language increasingly difficult to sit with. Best self. Full potential. Not wasting your talents. I have used all of it — with my students, with my own children, and on myself. But when I read it back slowly now, it is the language of perpetual inadequacy. That view points to the gap between who we are and who we could be, laments it, and urges us to close it. The gap, however, never closes. It is designed to be unclosable.
Han’s sharpest insight is that no one is forcing us. ‘The achievement-subject’, he writes, ‘is lord and master of itself. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom. Excess work and performance escalate into self-exploitation. This is more efficient than exploitation by others, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished.’. I wince to wonder if Han is right when he says: ‘Individual competition… escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results. …In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside them’
In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside them.
Han Byung-Chul
What might this mean for schools, and for families? Is it a coincidence that the search for improvement is now evolving into pathological perfectionism among many adults and children? I have long told students that they are working for themselves, not for me. I meant it as liberation but Han makes me wonder whether it simply relocates the pressure somewhere no one can see or question it, and calls that growth.
But I don’t think the answer is to abandon the values we care about — growth, resilience, creativity, critical thinking. These matter. The question is what relationship we model with them. Right now, I think many of us – and I include myself – treat them as permanent obligations, a checklist of self-improvement against which we are always falling short. What if we held them more lightly? Not as destinations, but as tools. Useful for now, appropriate for this moment, and possible to put down.
That is a harder thing to teach than any curriculum – and it begins, I suspect, not in the classroom but at the dinner table. My children already seem to understand something about the system we are all inside. The least I can do is be honest with them – and with myself – about what it costs, and what it would mean to want something different.
Reference
- Ehrenberg, A. (2010), Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press
- Han, Byung-Chul (2015) The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs; Stanford University Press
- Rosa, H, (2019) Resonance. Cambridge: Polity Books.
With thanks for Ellie Alchin, Gemma Dawson and Theo Sweeting for great conversation on these ideas.
