Hungry Ghosts of the Attention Economy

We are tired. About this much, perhaps, most of us can agree. Still, there is far less consensus about the cause of our collective exhaustion. Is it overwork? An impending sense of political catastrophe and apocalypse? A broad-scale mental health crisis? Or is there something else at work?

For the South Korean–born, German-schooled philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the fundamental source of our exhaustion lies in a particular, contemporary inability to escape the limits of our selves. Rather than offering a sociological or psychological analysis, his work homes in on the forces that fundamentally mediate our own sense of self, of others, and of the world. Since the late aughts, Han, a public intellectual and professor of philosophy in Berlin, has made a compelling case that the problem in each of these arenas is an excess of positivity. In his view, 21st-century forms of life have come to mediate our very sense of being a self in such a way that we are almost exclusively oriented by “a society of achievement” and its reinforcement. This manifests as an onslaught of bland forms of affirmation as the supposed reward for spending most of our time and energy in a collective striving for sameness, constant activity, and public acts of self-presentation.

A large-scale shift toward embracing positivity appears, perhaps, to “solve” other problems: exclusion, boredom, and the painful hierarchies from which our sense of self might otherwise emerge. We may no longer be locked in a battle with mother, father, or our bosses to define ourselves negatively against their imposition on our lives or sense of selfhood; rather, we can now choose from a bland array of easily reproducible types of personalities and repurpose them as ourselves on social media, for which we receive literal pings of affirmation. In this sense, Han notes, “the violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts.” We are trapped in a funhouse of stimulus and self, which is exhausting insofar as it makes us increasingly unable to access tools that might help us other ourselves to ourselves, to feel or encounter anything truly different, to be multiple—or even nothing. Thus, there is no outside. “Burnout,” for Han—a term used in the 2014 English translation of his work, The Burnout Society, several years before the now famous 2018 BuzzFeed piece on the topic—is not merely the exhaustion of the overworked body or the pathologically distressed mind but an “overheating of the ego.”

One of the more salient aspects of Han’s work is a lack of nostalgia for past philosophical worlds, modern or ancient. He does, however, find recourse in the philosophical and spiritual archive that might help us stem the tide of senseless positivity. His work explores many possible moments of resistance but centers largely on probing for a certain kind of “no.” Achievement society amounts, in a way, to a false cure: positivity for negativity. We have a “yes and” where we need a new kind of no—a “negative potency,” or, borrowing from Nietzsche, the “power not to do.” Such a “no” runs counter to what Han sees as the ultimate yes in disguise, contemporary American self-help literature. This burgeoning body of work entrenches us further in a state of hyperactivity by attempting “to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance.” For him, this is tantamount to a “total self-exploitation.” 

A true no, rather, marks the potential for the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life, a phrase borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, and the title of one of Han’s latest books. As Han asserts in The Burnout Society, “The vita contemplativa presupposes instruction in a particular way of seeing. Learning to see means ‘getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you’—that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze.” Such a way of being is more open to boredom, idleness, and stillness, essential in his mind to both creativity and contemplation, a space in which no shortage of others have found value (Margaret Talbot’s 2020 piece on boredom in the New Yorker summarizes them well). However, the essential function of the vita contemplativa is not to find a break but to “produce genuinely free time”; in other words, “living in the mode of contemplation.”

The near infinite reproduction of the ego as a problem, contemplative life as a solution: If this sentiment rings a bell for those familiar with Buddhism, it is no accident. Han has placed an explicit emphasis from the outset of his philosophical project on how Asian thought can serve as a counterpoint to the damaging fixations of “Western” forms of thinking and living. In Han’s view, Zen Buddhism, along with certain strains of East Asian thought more generally, can offer a form of freedom specifically tailored to the spiritual ills of the contemporary individual bound by the false promise of endless affirmation. A kind of D. T. Suzuki for the 21st century by way of German philosophy, Han attempts to reset the terms for Buddhism’s future in a newly global world through the always risky gambit of speaking about differences as large and unruly as “East” and “West.”

While this strain of his work had been unavailable in English for some time, beginning in 2022, the international politics and philosophy publisher Polity Press has done the great service of putting out three of his books directly addressing these themes, originally published in German at markedly different moments in Han’s career. The set includes The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, published in 2004, quite early in his academic career as a scholar of modern philosophy; Absence in 2016, not long after he gained a global following with his 2014 The Burnout Society; and Vita Contemplativa in 2022, a book clearly engaged with the challenges of lockdown solitude. Taken together, these three volumes land together as a coherent theory of political repose—that is, they offer a sustained argument against the notion that carving out spaces for contemplative life means siloing them from the political constitution of selfhood and identity.

In both Zen and Absence, Han lands in the familiar territory of Buddhism’s rhetoric of immediacy as a solution to the fundamental egoism in Western philosophy. The true no we need in service of a contemplative life can be found in “[t]he nothing, or emptiness, of Zen Buddhism,” which “is not directed at a divine There” but is rather “the radical turn toward immanence, toward Here.” In this sense, he proposes to us the power of immanence, rather than transcendence, as a posture of freedom apart from the striving of Western selfhood. As religions, Zen, Buddhism, and Chinese thought more generally—categories he uses fairly fluidly—are “free of the urge to invoke.” This orientation could, in his view, disentangle our relationship to selfhood from a particularly “Western” obsession with overcoming others and external things through an imitation divine agency, or determining whether we live in a world with or without its power to help us transcend our troublesome “selves.”

In a particularly provocative passage, he also strikes at the literal condition of modern Western thinking, taking René Descartes’s famous cogito to task: 

Zen master Dogen would suggest that Descartes continue with his meditation, pushing and deepening his doubt even further, to the point at which he himself becomes the great doubt in which the ‘I’ as well as the idea of ‘God’ are shattered completely. Having reached the point of that doubt, Descartes would probably have exclaimed neque cogito neque sum, I do not think, nor am I.

To bracket the self in this fashion is tantamount to what Han calls a “politics of inactivity,” which is what is ultimately at stake in ensuring new modes of freedom. While Han steers largely clear of the mechanics of any specific identity, he works hard to center the problem of identity itself, or at least its spiritual challenges. In this sense, Han could be placed in conversation with thinkers such as Zenju Earthlyn Manuel and Chenxing Han, who have renewed the argument with critical specificity that Buddhist practice is fundamentally entangled with questions of social and political power: Identity is both a problem of inherited, socially shaped identities and the logic of identification itself, and political and spiritual liberation could be interconnected in the shared challenges they present to these structures.

Perhaps his most singular reading of Buddhist thought is through the notion of “friendliness.” Han asserts that the impersonal relation of things occasioned by Buddhism demonstrates an “original friendliness” among self-less beings and essence-less things. Somewhere, away from the grasping at self and other-ness, where self-less beings can rest in and among themselves, interacting with essence-less things that needn’t be “invoked” or “overcome,” both beings and things are “freed of the striving for being.” In this vita contemplativa, these beings and things encounter each other in a “friendliness” that is possible only when the “fortress of interiority” that defines Western selfhood is ceded. This constitutes a form of conceptual intervention in theorizing the Mahayana, and it could be offered as his explanation for the conditions of compassion to arise that are neither “sympathy” nor “a subjective feeling or inclination,” since “No one feels. Compassion is something that happens to you. It is friendly.” This friendliness speaks back to Han’s assertion that we live in a society constantly asking for sameness. The “false” friendliness of, say, assimilation in a society where difference is so flattened, so commodified, dovetails with Han’s reinvestment in new kinds of difference, theorized through very old notions of coexistence. If emptiness is the Mahayana’s hinge between compassion and insight, then “friendliness” could be a provocative conceptual counterpart—or even an alternate translation for this often troublesome term.

Identity is both a problem of inherited, socially shaped identities and the logic of identification itself, and political and spiritual liberation could be interconnected in the shared challenges they present to these structures.

Reading these works, you will notice quickly that Han’s writing can be programmatic, and the terms of his thinking can feel technical, if not abstruse, to those with a distaste for European philosophy. However, the stakes are, for the most part, immediate to a critique of the stultifying structures of the self, accompanied by an appropriately urgent plea to recover the space of contemplative life. They are, at their most forceful, a provocation against the structures that mediate the very way we relate to ourselves and the world, as well as the tools to access whatever may lie beyond, and thus require a similarly expansive breadth of analysis. 

Still, Han can himself overreach and fall victim to the shallowness of similar endeavors. Some of the claims he makes about the spiritual nature of Japanese food culture and the Chinese language, primarily in Absence, ring hollow, regurgitating centuries-old stereotypes, and are by and large unnecessary to his larger points. These moments raise larger questions about whether it is ultimately critical to his analysis that the orientations of selfhood he identifies are locateable in terms of East and West, or in terms of some other set of differences entirely. I’m not sure if he or others in the comparative philosophical community have an answer to this one yet. 

For all his axiomatic grandeur, it is worth following Han as he asks us to consider how some of the biggest forces structuring our lives trap us in very small spaces, narrowing the apertures through which we can achieve self-knowledge, fulfillment, or even transcendence in ever more minuscule degrees. In this way, he has made the case that we are all hungry ghosts in an endless attention economy. Wanting more, striving harder, we get less. In this sense, his works asks the form that repose is to take if we are ever to get a rest that is neither a mere lunch break from the late capitalist hustle nor death.