Recently a friend told me, “I feel like my job is a drain on my soul.” His words describe how many people feel today. In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han observes how modern life has turned us into “achievement-subjects.” He explains, “The achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow.” In our desperation to maximize productivity, he argues, we’ve become a society defined by voluntary self-exploitation.