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The general lack of purpose beyond oneself is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness and emptiness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare labour corresponds entirely to a bare life. All that remains is material status flaunting.
People who suffer from depression or burnout syndrome develop the same symptoms as caged wild animals. They are entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards. They are like Bartleby the Scrivener from Melville’s short story.
What leads people to this depression? It’s the hyper-activity of what positive capital has twisted them into. They react immediately, yielding to every impulse, email, Facebook Like and new Netflix show. Chasing every rainbow results in total exhaustion.
Think back to my wild animal analogy. Hyper-activity leads to an abrupt switch into hyper-passivity; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus without resistance. Instead of freedom, it produces new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer.
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption. Our phones are always on. Emails constantly arrive. Social media is always there. The rests and “between-times” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals - and we are told that this is a good thing!
The person who believes they can do anything - who wants a picture perfect child, high-flying career, a pristine Instagram page and a tight body built from 20 weekly yoga classes - has been conned by positivity into a prison of narcissism. Burnout or depression closely follows.
Without doubt, or without people telling us “no”, we just follow every urge or impulse. Again, this isn’t freedom, it is the acceleration of capital transforming us into more efficient machines of production and - more importantly - consumption.
The positivization of the world means that both human beings and society are transforming into autistic performance-machines. And sociopathic status seekers are the biggest victims. They aren’t winners. Narcissistic self-referentiality is just leading them faster to exhaustion.
Sociopathic status seekers often think they’re smart, but most of them are just busy fools. Their constant calculating means they can no longer think for themselves. Hyper-activity is actually hyper- passivity because you are not thinking, you’re just following capital’s commands
We are burdened not by rules and prohibitions but excessive positivity and possibility. Our dictatorial imperative is to let your self flourish - “be your own truth”. Think of all those films where the message was to “be yourself” and “you’ll achieve your dreams”.
Yet we can’t keep up with ever-rising status. Our dreams are dictated to us by society and they move ever increasingly upwards and out of our grasp. They’re always others richer and prettier than you. Entering higher social circles just means the goalposts are moved further.
So if just “being ourselves” leads to our goals, the implicit message is that if we don’t reach our goals (impossible as they constantly change) then the problem is in fact ourselves. When reality hits, the positive society means the ego takes the hit directly. Depression follows
The society of achievement and activeness is generating excessive tiredness and exhaustion. Only when we utterly break down and are mentally and physically exhausted are we finally finding the negativity and respite we so desperately require.
The ancients knew this. The Hebrews created the Sabbath for a reason. The Sabbath is a word that originally meant “stopping”. Without this rest nothing can be achieved. Civilisationcannot contemplate and advance. People don’t come together and form communities, bonds.. families.
Prometheus brought work to mankind when he gave mortals the gift of fire. Today’s achievement-subject deems itself free when in fact it is bound like Prometheus. Doomed to be tortured by the eagle of acceleration gnawing at its organs and never allowed to rest.
The sociopathic status seeker does not pursue works of duty. Its maxims are not obedience, law, and the fulfillment of obligation, but rather freedom, pleasure, and inclination. Above all, it expects the profits of enjoyment from work.
It works for pleasure and does not act at the behest of others. Instead, it hearkens mainly to itself. It is the ultimate self-starting entrepreneur - the start-up guy, the social media huckster. A person who thinks they are their own boss and is “empowered”.
However, such freedom others is not just empowering and liberating. “Freedom” means developing new constraints. Freedom from others switches into narcissistic self-relation, which creates many of the mental issues we see afflicting so many.
One thing you notice about sociopathic status seekers online and in the workplace is they have no character - no principals they stick to. Think how social media maximises this and adds to the sickness ever more, like by like.
Thousands of Facebook or LinkedIn frIends offers further proof of the late-modern ego’s lack of character and definition. They try to please everybody, strive to offend nobody, and in turn become nobody themselves. As always, think of capital’s unconscious motive here.
In positive terms, such a human being without character is flexible, able to assume any form, play any role, perform any function. This shapelessness—or, alternately, flexibility—creates a high degree of economic efficiency. The best worker bee has no values and thinks he is free
“In social networks, the function of “friends” is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.” - Byung-Chul Han.
Narcissism isn’t empowerment. Narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Let me quote the sociologist Richard Sennett about why this is so:
“Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self...”
“.. It is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other—and then it becomes meaningless.. The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of oneself... one drowns in the self.”
Depression & burnout follow overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted sociopathic status seeker grinds itself down. He becomes tired, exhausted by himself, and at war with himself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward.
Narcissists exhaust themselves in rat races they run against themselves.
Digitalisation is making this worse. There’s very little “reality” or consequence online which in meat world would warn a sociopath when their narcissism is getting out of control. Online, the narcissistic ego encounters itself first and foremost in everything it sees.
The real world makes itself known through resistance. Act like a dickhead and someone is likely to beat you or fire you. But our ridiculous overly-positive society is removing this resistance to the sociopathic.
I’m definitely waffling now so let me try and wrap this up...
Capital absorbs everything. What is capital but relentless competition? Our positive achievement society has created absolute competition because now we have narcissists competing with their own egos to produce/consume more. A destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over
“You can do anything!” “Just do it!” These slogans of positive achievement create a society of self-exploitation, which is all good for capital until the obedient little narcissist exploits itself too much and finally burns out.
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