We Have Become Exhausted Slaves in a Culture of Positivity

We live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. This is one of the central tenets of the book Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (translatable as The Fatigue Society or The Tiredness Society) by the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han is a professor at the Berlin Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) and one of the most widely read contemporary philosophers in Germany. He was born in Seoul, where he studied metallurgy before he moved to Germany in the 1980s to pursue a career in philosophy. His doctoral thesis and some of his initial work in the 1990s focused on Heidegger, but during the past decade, Han has written about broad range of topics regarding contemporary culture and society. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft was first published in 2010 and helped him attain a bit of a rock-star status in Germany despite his desire to avoid too much public attention – unlike some of his celebrity philosopher colleagues.