Being Tired Together
Breakfast uppers, dinner downers and the comradeship in the Burnout Society
Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.
- Rene Dumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
The idea of Friday night is terrific. Even after 8 hours of corporate drudgery filled with pointless meetings and a pile of nerve-racking emails, you can still somehow ride the wave. The dinner is skipped, the shower quick, makeup put on hastily while syncing five different telegram threads in parallel. One for the road and you don’t even realise how you ended up out in a wild swirl of excitement.
You embrace all the joys of people breathing at each other in the crammed basement, the muffled echos of inebriated babbling and the sweet confusion of unrehearsed performances.
Hugs and kisses and drinks of your choice, merry times and smiling faces… and a couple of hours later you stand on the dance floor and you dare to, just for a brief second, stop. The lights freeze, the smokey room rips at the seams: Jesus Christ, I am tired. The nagging voice of “You are getting old” chants in the 4/4 rhythm, and you can hardly keep up with it. What do you do?
Go to the bar. Always a good idea. When you look around at the dimly lit faces of your friends there, clink your glasses and sigh in unison, the secret is spilt: We are all tired here.
Modern Restlessness
This agitation is becoming so great that the higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to ripen; it is as if the seasons were following too quickly on one another. From lack of rest, our civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, which is to say the restless, people been prized more.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Multitasking and hyperactivity are on the pedestal of the Technics governed society. In the vortex of overstimulation, our focus fragments, and we don’t get much chance to step back, contemplate. This way, we lose the freedom to choose what to respond to; we are drawn into a mechanical state, existence as a response: the deeds degrade into reactions, the soul dissipates, and living turns into a mere biological process.
Our activity renders us passive.
And it drains us.
The possibility of not doing anything, not being productive, scares a modern man so much that we constantly think of new side projects, new challenges, new tasks. Those are my hobbies, alright? I love my job, alright? I need to express myself, alright?
While being creative and having self discipline for juggling around half a dozen of activities is admirable, I’ll just drop here a question for reflection: how many of these are just noble ways of distracting us from actually challenging ourselves?
Maybe sometimes the toughest challenge is to stay still.
The Burnout Society
I’m sitting in a cafe, halfway through a busy week, on my third cup of coffee, paging through a heavily annotated copy of The Burnout Society1 by Byung-Chul Han. I’m trying to keep up with my social life, art projects, magick practice, corporate career, diligent reading habits and a bit of exercise on the top. I feel I’m failing. I am tired. I am exhausted.
My tiredness is private. It’s the divisive ‘I-tiredness’ of overexertion forced from the inside. Of course, nobody expects any of this from me: I am the perpetrator and the victim of this mania. And it’s a sickening form of self-aggression that results in a narrow-minded frustration that strengthens the ego, makes one feel superior: ‘I have a right to be tired because I am such a busy person.’ The tiredness of this kind is violent. It destroys all compassion, it reinforces the invisible walls of individualism that keep us apart.
Yes, I’d often, in looking myself over, surprise a cold, misanthropic arrogance or, worse, a condescending pity for all the commonplace occupations that could never in all the world lead to a royal tiredness such as mine.
- Peter Handke, On Tiredness
Peter Handke, in his essay ‘On Tiredness’,2 recognises this caustic state. We all know it very well, don’t we? But before we settle for the feeling of failure, he suggests looking deeper. Somewhere under the jagged edges of the initial frustration resides a beautiful, eloquent, reconciliatory ‘We-tiredness’.
A surrender.
Silent, dull-eyed salvation.
I wanted nothing from them; just being able to look at them was enough for me. My gaze was indeed that of a good spectator at a game that cannot be successful without at least one such onlooker. This tired man's looking-on was an activity, it did something, it played a part; because of it, the actors in the play became better, more beautiful than ever – for one thing because, while being looked at by eyes such as mine, they took their time. As by a miracle, the tiredness of such an onlooker nullified his ego, that eternal creator of unrest and with it all other distortions, quirks, and frowns.
- Peter Handke, On Tiredness
As Han put it, it’s the rendering of “more of less of me”, the soft loosening of the hysterical dominance of ego. And as the sense of identity grows smaller, the focus of our attention shifts from self to the world, the actor becomes an observer. The tiredness colours our gaze and makes the world cast off its names and become enough. Just being is all that’s expected from us in our weary state - the desire to have and be more are on hold. The tiredness suspends our hyperactivity, we are forced into stillness.
This Immanent Religion of Tiredness founds a community that needs no kinship. Under the surface of frustration and self-importance, we are all tired in the same way and that realisation can be a truly bonding experience. Let ourselves, instead of being tired of each other, be tired with each other. We might find a brief escape from our lonely, self-imposed prisons.
I’ll just leave you this one cover here. It might fit the mood.
Thank you for your time, hope you rest well 🖤
Highly recommended read!!
It was surprisingly hard, even for a pirate like me, to get the e-version. HMU if you want a copy
this is a topic that should be discussed more in society