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The Burnout Society

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The Burnout Society

By: Byung-Chul Han, Erik Butler(Translated by)
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder.

Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

This audiobook is expertly read by Peter Noble, with audio engineering by Logan Nyman. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©2015 Byung-Chul Han (P)2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC Mental Health Movements Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Sociology Health
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A small but great book. One of Han’s early works which merits repeated listening as its arguments are compelling, and the writing so beautifully crystallised.

Original and Insightful

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Narration is automated and choppy, losing fluidity, which is important to grasp the hypothesis presented.

Interestings concepts But deficient narration

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This is absolute garbage word-salad nonsense, like a stream of consciousness of a pretentious academic who cannot express an idea clearly and who it seems has set a goal of describing things in the vaguest terms possible, Now, I'm sure this is 'extremely deep' philosophy, but it seems to me that if you can wax lyrical without saying anything particularly meaningful or intelligible at all, its probably BS masquerading as philosophy. Can't understand it? The problem is of course, that I must be too thick to get it, because only a high IQ person could pretend to themselves that this makes any kind of real sense. No doubt some will read this and think 'well you just don't get it', but honestly you're kidding yourself if you think this is articulating anything definite or empirically observable about the world. If you can't express an idea clearly to a lay audience its no good whatsoever. This is twaddle, pure and simple. Maybe a bad translation though? Only 2 hours as well so not great value for money, but I couldn't stand this trash even after 5 minutes so it doesn't really matter.

Impenetrable twaddle masquerading as intellect

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This book was way too much philosophical jargon with no evidence. Extremely repetitive. I returned it.

It’s not what you think

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Not for me, I guess mostly because I found myself being pretty sceptical of most of the authors claims. Also it mostly just seemed to be his opinion without any evidence to back up his claims. I think when you are making claims about the cause of health issues you need to back that up with a bit more data. Also I found the way he talked about ADHD and autism to be slightly offensive.

meh

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