The Burnout Society

Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process

If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation.

Every man has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened, and, in general, kept in awe (respect coupled with fear) by an internal judge; and this authority watching over the law in him is not something that he himself (voluntarily) makes, but something incorporated into his being

Depression ... is melancholia plus equality, the perfect disorder of the democratic human being."16 Ehrenberg locates depression in the same epoch when the "sovereign man" announced by Nietzsche has become mass reality

A hyperactive person would have disgusted Nietzsche: the "strong soul" keeps "calm," "moves slowly," and "has an aversion to what’s too lively."28 Thus Spoke Zarathustra declares:

All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange—you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.

If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting—not even for laziness!29

the aim is to strike a balance between vita activa and vita contemplativa. In this sense, Saint Gregory the Great wrote: "One must know, if a good course of life requires that one pass from the active to the contemplative life, then it is often useful when the soul returns from the contemplative to the active life in such a way that the flame of contemplation lighted in the heart confers its entire perfection on activity. Thus, the active life must lead to contemplation, but contemplation must proceed from what we have observed within and calls us back to activity