trackingmyreads 's review for:

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

challenging

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Very challenging for me to understand - though I enjoyed the process of attempting to follow along. Even so - I have many underlines and highlights and stars in the margins. I think I’ll need some smarter person to truly help me connect some of the dots of this book. I also struggled to connect fully with the assertion that societally we have left behind our tendency to “other” other cultures or ways of being in our pursuit of globalization which much of his thesis is predicated on. Indeed, it seems like today in the US the concepts of othering and negation are very alive and well - but this book material was written some time ago, not in the US, and let’s be honest I might not really understand what he meant anyways. Nevertheless, while I sometimes felt my lived experience of this concept was at odds with his assertion, the result on individuals he describes I completely relate to. That is - we no longer need others to exploit our labor as we do it to ourselves.