>>85102907
Don't think modern people generally have a great work ethos. Neither do we have self-sufficiency with all our modern tools (now AI) or better said in the past people were better at proactively solving problems. Compared to the 19th century western life is pretty laid back

>>85102983
i think you might be conflating visible effort with internalized pressure.
han's argument isn't that people work harder now than in the 19th century in terms of physical output or hours but that the psychological relationship to productivity has fundamentally shifted. a 19th century factory worker was being coerced by external conditions, poverty, physical necessity, direct supervision. the modern achievement subject is coercing himself, which is a different and in some ways more totalizing form of control precisely because it has no off switch and no external party to resist.
>self-sufficiency
this connects to something han discusses around what he calls the "erosion of the other." modern tools, including ai, reduce friction and remove the need to develop genuine competence through sustained effort, which sounds like liberation but actually produces a specific kind of helplessness. you can accomplish more with less skill, but the sense of agency that comes from hard-won capability does't transfer from the tool to the person using it.
>laid back compared to the 19th century
han would argue that the achievement society generates its own form of suffering that's harder to name and harder to resist, precisely because it doesn't always look like suffering from the outside. burnout, depression, the specific exhaustion of someone who has been optimizing themselves for years and still hasn't achieved what they want to; these are the 21st century equivalent of what hard physical labor produced in the 19th, just distributed differently and much harder to attribute to a cause.

>>85103047
a 19th century factory worker was being coerced by external conditions, poverty, physical necessity, direct supervision. the modern achievement subject is coercing himself, which is a different and in some ways more totalizing form of control precisely because it has no off switch and no external party to resist.
I'm not sure this is true everywhere. In my own surroundings people 40 years ago worked more for work's own sake while people now work for the paycheck and need to be directed more. Which seems what this guy describes but turned around. But maybe this is a cultural difference

>>85103188
Forgot greentext but you get the point

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>>85102907
Is the pressure internal to optimize indefinitely? Or is the pressure to meet the demands of CEOs and women who settle for nothing less than eugenic ubermensch for hiring and partnering with?
When presented with the problem of modern society, that most men are now extreaneous if not flat out hated, an introvert will turn inward to look for reasons why, yes. But correlation is not causation.

Society is shifting into all agreements being done with two currencies: Processor cycles for AI machines, person's genetic quality. The former is power and water and all that, the latter is obvious.

>>85102907
>a shift from the disciplinary society foucault described, where power operated through external prohibition and surveillance, to one where the dominant mode of control is internal. we no longer have an external authority telling us what we can't do. instead we have an internalized imperative to perform, optimize, and produce, which he argues generates a specific kind of exhaustion and depression that disciplinary society didn't produce.
I am pretty sure Foucault said all of this as well, no?

This is just a repackaging of the same old normie advice.

Chad said it better: "You're in your head too much, bro"

>>85103188
what you're saying isn't necessarily incompatible with han's writings.
the modern self-motivated, self-optimized archetype internalizes the pressure and burns out from self-exploitation. in that demographic, specifically, where the pressure is internalized precisely because the work is identity-constituting. when your job is also your passion, your brand, your self-expression, the coercion disappears into the self and becomes invisible.
on the other hand, the working class worker loses the external sources of meaning that made the transactional relationship to work tolerable, and ends up checked out rather than burned out. for this group, the shift you're observing might be less about internalized achievement pressure and more about the collapse of whatever gave work meaning beyond the paycheck, community, craft pride, a sense of permanence and contribution, things that have genuinely eroded over forty years for a lot of working people.
different symptoms, possibly the same disease.
han just has more to say on the first archetype i talked about here versus the regular worker.

>>85103355
>internal vs external pressure
his answer would probably be that the two aren't separable, the external demands of the labor market and the mating market get internalized so completely that the subject experiences them as self-generated drive rather than external coercion. the optimization pressure originates externally but turns internally, which is what makes it so hard to locate and resist. you can't rebel against a demand that feels like your own ambition.
>CEOs and women
if the achievement society is selecting for a narrower and narrower band of optimized human product, then the men who don't fit that band aren't experiencing personal failure, but a structural sorting process that has no space for them regardless of character or effort. han would frame that as a systemic pathology rather than a natural order revealing itself.
>genetic quality
"genetic quality" as a currency assumes a stable, legible hierarchy of human value that the mating market is efficiently sorting toward. but the actual research on what produces stable pair bonding and relationship satisfaction doesn't support a clean eugenic sorting model.
what looks like selection for genetic quality in the short term mating market produces different outcomes than what sustains long term human social organization, which has always run on a much messier and more reciprocal set of values than pure genetic hierarchy.
at the short term mating level, what gets selected for in high throughput environments like apps and bars does skew toward easily legible physical markers that function as rough genetic proxies, symmetry, height, facial structure. but even here the sorting isn't clean. personality, social dominance, humor, and contextual factors introduce enormous variance that a pure genetic quality model can't account for.
the same person gets rated dramatically differently depending on context, social proof, and framing, which shouldn't happen if genetic quality were being read directly.
(cont.)

>>85103607 (cont.)
>>85103355
at the long term pair bonding level, that model breaks down further. the traits that predict relationship stability and satisfaction in the research are almost entirely non-genetic in the sense the model implies. emotional availability, conflict resolution capacity, reciprocal investment, shared values, attachment security. these aren't genetic quality markers in any meaningful sense. and the people who are most selected for in the short term mating market, high dominance, low agreeableness, high sensation seeking, actually show worse long term relationship outcomes on average, more infidelity, less investment, higher dissolution rates.
human pair bonding across cultures and history has been mediated primarily by kinship networks, resource exchange, community standing, and reciprocal obligation rather than genetic sorting. the relatively unmediated individual choice mating market is historically anomalous, not a revelation of the underlying natural order. what it is actually optimizing for is legibility under conditions of informational scarcity and time pressure, which selects for a narrow set of easily readable signals rather than whatever "genetic quality" is supposed to mean in practice.
a system that's producing mass male disengagement, collapsing birth rates, and widespread relational dissatisfaction on both sides isn't obviously selecting toward fitness in any meaningful sense. it might be selecting toward something that looks like quality on a profile while actively degrading the conditions that make human social organization work.

>>85103499
Ok, then it is more agreeable to my experience. I was just a bit cautious about overly focusing on overachieving because the supposed remedy to that would be to take a more laid back approach to life, less haste etc.
As such working hours have been reduced here but work related stress has increased. So obviously something else is wrong. Or maybe one could shove it under stress from optimising restfulness but I think it's more cultural degradation

>>85103368
partially. han is explicitly building on and diverging from foucault simultaneously.
foucault did describe the shift from sovereign power, the external authority that says "thou shalt not," toward disciplinary power, which operates through surveillance, normalization, and the internalization of the gaze. the panopticon: you behave as if you're being watched even when you're not, because the possibility of observation has been internalized.
where han parts ways is on what he sees as foucault's framework being insufficient for the present day. han argues that disciplinary society still operates through prohibition and external normalization, there's still a norm being imposed from outside even if it's been internalized.
the achievement society he describes is something he considers new to so everyone: the imperative isn't "you must conform to this norm" but "you must optimize yourself without limit." disciplinary power says don't, achievement power says do more. the first produces the neurotic, in foucault's terms. the second produces the depressive and the burnout case, which han argues is a categorically different kind of subject and a categorically different kind of suffering.
foucault also developed the concept of biopower and later governmentality, which do gesture toward the self-governing subject, but han's argument is that these still don't fully capture the specific pathology of a subject who is simultaneously his self and his own product.

>>85103407
sometimes platitudes work, but, depending on the type of person you are, often aren't enough or comforting. there's a difference between a diagnosis and a solution. sometimes you need the first before you can do the second.
"you're in your head too much" does correctly identifies the symptom, the overthinking, and the analysis that halts action. what it doesn't tell you is why that's happening or how to actually get out of it, which is where most people get stuck. knowing you're in your head too much and being able to stop being in your head too much are completely different problems.
if you understand that the loop is, for example, say, a nervous system regulation problem, or a shadow projection, or an achievement society pathology, or all three simultaneously, you have more control over on it than if you just know it's happening and feel bad about it.
that said, there's a version of philosophical engagement with these questions that becomes its own form of staying in your head, which is probably what your reply is pointing at, but it helps to have words and an explanation for what you're experiencing. it is correct that, at some point, the thinking has to make contact with actual behavior and actual experience or it's just a more sophisticated way of not doing anything.
the difference between understanding something and actually living differently is where most of the real work is, and neither the chad nor the philosopher have a clean answer for that.