“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.”
― Federico Fellini
The Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, once wrote that ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. That was long ago. If only he could see our convulsive way of life now.
We live in a feverish, technocratic age where soulless terms like “optimization,” “production,” and “performance” constantly flash across our screen-gazing eyes. We live in the grinding wheels of a brutal, dehumanizing machine. And deep down, we know it, but it has become normal to us. This is what we were thrown into. This is what we’ve learned to adapt to.
Our lives today are characterized by an unending hunger for power, money, ambition, and a febrile “busyness” that urges us to be constantly “doing something” and “achieving” some aim.
Hustle or Die—the maniacal mantra of modernity. More performance. More publicity. More production. More consumption. The modern individual is so entirely absorbed in external activity, chasing cheap, manufactured desires, that the inner life has withered on the vine.
Today’s predicament is what one of today’s most interesting thinkers, Byung-Chul Han, calls the compulsion of production. Han has rightly labeled our way of life in the modern world, the Achievement Society.
“Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but ‘achievement-subjects.’ They are entrepreneurs of themselves.”
In other words, Modern society has shifted from a disciplinary society (Foucault’s panopticon, external prohibition) to an achievement society where individuals freely exploit themselves in a perpetual chase for productivity, connectivity, and optimization.
Individuals of this “Achievement Society” are performers who behave toward things and the world “as consumers rather than as users.” We no longer relate to our communities; instead, we relate to our own egos. Self-transcendence has been exchanged for self-improvement.
In this performance society, all its members “perform themselves.” The cult of self and its perpetual publicity dominate the era, which is why it’s so difficult to “conduct social interactions outside the boundaries of the self.”
The culture of self-idolization has robbed its members of playfulness, joy, and exuberance. “The culture retreats from that holy sphere of play,” to pay homage to the “profane seriousness of work.”
“Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life.”
From birth, we’re branded as functionaries for capital markets: relentlessly conditioned, measured, prodded, punished, and “educated” to become a more efficient cog.
Everyone today has a scheme. A product to sell, a lifestyle to peddle, a provocative ideology to whore out, and nothing seems real or cherished anymore. The sacred has been closed off to make way for the profane. The artificial. The plastic. The digital.
Society, in return, has become atomized and devoid of enchantment. Culture, Han writes, “is offered in commodity form.”
Many of us moderns go through our entire days without once setting foot in the real world. We live in a fabricated, artificial realm, with minds stuffed with trivialities and distractions. Life has become a shitty reality show where the cast members take on the role of second-rate actors, constantly in character, playing to the camera.
The compulsion of production prods us to forever seek the new and to “consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences.” This induces a sort of nervous restlessness that accelerates time and “hurtles” us from “one possibility to the next. It never achieves rest—that is, completion.”
Life has become more rushed and directionless. We are in a raging sea without rudders. Our ancestors lived in a lasting present. We moderns sacrifice the present for the next new stimuli.
Is it any wonder that we are a society riddled with depression, anxiety, and a hopeless restlessness that beguiles us into conforming to the innumerable stupidities of the modern world?
“Under the weight of their own doings,” Han writes, “humans suffocate.” The need to be hyperactive, to produce, to perform, “leads to breathlessness.”
Nietzsche saw our predicament early on when he remarked:
“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
“Instead of leisurely strolling around,” Han writes, “one rushes from one event to another.” Instead of forging deep relationships, we form “connections.” Instead of the slow stride of deep contemplation, we live in a furious pace of passing images and information that “do not attract lasting attention.”
We are whizzing through the world with a mind filled with nonsense, rushing “from one presence to the next.” When someone remarks that they “have no time,” what they are essentially saying is that they have lost themselves to the fabricated world.
A life devoid of a higher meaning will ultimately metastasize into self-worship and its unsanctified byproduct—busyness. The self becomes both idol and project. Without transcendence, the self turns inward and begins to feed on itself.
Being more “active” hardly ever leads to being more “free.” Usually, the more active one is the more enlsaved they become. “Not the active life but the contemplative life makes man into what he should be,” Han writes.
Nietzsche again understood this when he wrote, “Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity…in this regard they are lazy…The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.”
Real freedom, in the highest sense, requires the ability to say “No,” to linger, to be silent, to be unavailable – capacities that the era of “Achievement” systematically destroys.
The world has weaponized busyness into a form of self-inflicted tyranny. Motion replaces meaning.
The “acceleration” of time and life itself robs us of one of the most essential human endeavors—contemplation. It’s only in the state of “lingering” that the timeless truths emerge. It’s the fertile ground for creativity and insight to arise.
Life without stillness, Han reminds us, becomes a series of disconnected points, a “time without scent,” devoid of narrative arc or ritualistic rhythm. The result? Burnout, depression, and a soul-crushing fatigue, where the individual, ostensibly free, is chained to an internal prison of self-surveillance.
Depression, Han tells us, “is based on an excessive relation to self. Wholly incapable of leaving the self behind, of transcending ourselves and relating to the world, we withdraw into our shells. The world disappears.”
What is the remedy for this feverish, superficial way of life that we’ve created for ourselves?
Contemplative inactivity. “We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity,” Han writes, “that represents an intense and radiant form of life.”
Inactivity is a condition “in which there is no care, no need, no compulsion.” It’s in this mode of life that we shed our robotic tendencies and become human. In a world absorbed in work, screens, and productivity, inactivity “opens up the prospect for us of the possibility of an entirely different world,” a world of Being.
Inactivity is not an escape or a cop out. It’s not relaxation, laziness, or simply “switching off.” Rather, as Joseph Pieper put it, inactivity “is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul…”
Inactivity is not the opposite of activity, Han tells us; rather, activity feeds off inactivity, it is the “unconscious event” that leads us to “create something that was not there before.”
In other words, inactivity leads to a “contemplative consideration of truth” and “collecting oneself.”
Aristotle believed that the highest form of life is “a life dedicated to contemplation.” It rejuvenates life by enlivening the senses. Activity and action only skim the surface of things, which is why they are blind to truth. “We see the truth,” Han writes, “only once we enter into inactivity.”
Nietzsche understood this:
"Inventive people live altogether differently from active ones; they need time, so that purposeless, unregulated activity occurs, experiments can take place, and new paths can be taken; they feel their way, rather than walking just on the old paths, as the usefully active people do.”
Heidegger believed in the necessity to simply “dwell”— meaning, to remain, to care, to let things be what they are. To dwell is to stay long enough for meaning to appear. To stand before a tree, the night sky, a poem, a death, or a silence without immediately trying to turn it into data or productivity.
We moderns live in a perpetual state of movement without arrival. Information without wisdom. Housing without home. Communication without listening. We’re impatient people who demand that all our needs be satisfied at once. We focus on short-term effects and quick gains. “Actions are reduced to reactions.”
We work too hard to spend too much. It’s this sad repetition of our lives that robs it of its more vital blood. As Jacques Ellul once reminded us: “It became difficult to do anything but work in order to live. But for what? Exclusively for consumption. Leisure was granted to man, but only the leisure of the consumer. Man’s primordial functions of creating, praying, judging disappeared in the rising tide of material goods.”
Busyness, or the compulsion of production, fragments our attention and disperses our inward life. It keeps us reacting rather than choosing. Silence becomes something to avoid. Stillness feels like waste.
Without sustained inwardness, without contemplation and leisure, the self never consolidates—it stays thin, frantic, and unformed.
Excessive busyness and mental occupation lead to a shallow, fragmented life and a contracted, mechanical mind. Socrates believed that a busy life was a barren one because it neglected the cultivation of the soul, wisdom, and virtue, leading to a life full of activity but empty of meaning.
Thomas Merton, who viewed modern life as inherently violent due to its rush and pressure of constant activity, overwork, noise, consumerism, and superficial distractions, writes:
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)… work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
Han concludes that what must be won back is contemplative rest. Disconnection as defiance. The goal of the contemplative life, Han writes, “is not to last or endure in time but to experience an eternity that transcends the contemporary world and time itself.”
We must unplug from the grid of availability and allow for unproductivity. Not everything must be shared or optimized. The shitshow doesn’t have to go on. We can exit the hectic stage and live closer to the earth, “more aware of the ground on which we rest, and of the space in which we are.”
We can depart from the ranks of a society marching towards its own doomed fate and seek out the contemplative in the everyday—through art, nature, and beauty.
This is how we counter the failings responsible for so much of the greed, strife, hatred, vulgarity, and treachery of our ill-fated world. To become a fugitive from a spasmodic society whose cultural scene is dominated by commercialism, ideological fads, lunacy, superficiality, and straight-up mayhem.
Edward Abbey, a civilization fugitive in his own right, proposed that, since “the world of men is ugly…ugly, cruel, trivial and unjust,” the only thing for an “honest” soul is to withdraw and “cultivate your own garden or look to the mountains.”
An ideal life is to BE more and HAVE less. To root oneself in contemplative awareness. To engage in unhurried conversation that meanders without an agenda. To read old books and ponder great poems. And, perhaps most importantly, to practice the lost art of solitary stillness that empties the mind of its compulsive chatter.
In truth, we can all lead a life that slips the noose of busyness. I think many of us in the modern world have the sneaking suspicion that the narratives that structure our lives and thoughts are lies. We know that something transcendent lies beyond the shadows of the cave.
In a progress-oriented world bent on its own demise, we can simply “do nothing.” This is the beginning of spiritual maturity.
Rather than willfully intervening in things, try to make use of the “possibilities that lie dormant in things.” Without stillness, our lives become untethered from the divine and completely submerged in a desecrated wasteland.
Hyperactivity inevitably leads to anxiety, fear, and burnout, as we are now seeing with the vast majority of the population. Refuse to become a victim of this soul-eating machine.
Early dawns without screens, afternoons for aimless wandering, evenings for rituals that bind us to others in quiet solidarity. This is the new resistance—renunciation. Seeing through the hoopla of endless production and material gain and fostering a self that can encounter the world without a commercialized agenda.
We must break the tyranny of hyperactivity to free up our capacity for sensory enjoyment of the world. We don’t have to become hermits or recluses, though we can, but we do need enough silence and solitude in our lives to feed what’s left of the tiny flicker of flame within us.
In a high-strung culture that demands we be everywhere at once, Han says, be nowhere, fully.
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