a moment of understanding

[kaberett]

Via star-anise, the following excerpt from Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Byung-Chul Han):

... psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.

Until reading this, I'd always found this kind of argument baffling and alienating, but for some reason this iteration-articulation of it has, I think, made things click into place.

The gap in my understanding arises, I think, from the fact that I was making myself actively ill with perfectionism, with stress, with Getting Everything Done, up until the end of my first year of university, when I did very well in my exams and therefore, as best I can tell, proved to my hindbrain that I Could Do This, and abruptly started prioritising... well... self-care and healing, instead. I read the stuff about self-optimisation, I took it to heart, and I decided that the thing I wanted to do was get better and so I... did.

It has been slow and occasionally faltering, but now I eat regular meals and I sleep approximately regular hours at night and I (try to) listen to my body about when I need to stop and then I do that...

... and this means I did worse in all my subsequent exams and I can't even pretend to hold a full-time job and I take naps during the day and I have slowed way, way down. I recognise that I am lucky that (for now) I live in a country where the social security net is such that I can do that, such that I have the material option of not working myself to death --

-- but the disconnect is around the crux of the thing, the definition that "self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance". I'm just... working toward a different definition of "efficiency" and "performance", I think, and for whatever reason the self-care advice actually worked for me, actually practically directed me towards my own health as centre and priority, rather than my output.

I'm not sure how much of that is down to the precise disability activism context I found myself in, but -- it itched at me, to not understand why so many people were finding so harmful a broad genre of advice I had found intensely -- well -- healing.


There's also, of course, the part where I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question -- but still. It's a relief to have puzzled it out.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I think it's a divergence at the basic aims level. You're looking at self-help to literally help yourself, whereas the market is largely aimed at enhancing finance/social status. Internal health vs external wealth.

[cynthia1960]

Nailed it.

[recessional]

Yeah while takes like this aren't wrong, I really dislike the way that they cede words like "health" to the pathology they're describing. Because it has nothing to do with actual health; it has everything to do with the external performance of status-linked expectations that are mislabelled "health" and while words do shift meaning with usage, allowing this one to remain triumphant is an actual loss, because it removes the word that we actually do need to talk about . . . .

. . . you know. HEALTH.

[staranise]

I did quite like the little twist of "Internal health vs external wealth" - wealth and health aren't quite the same thing.

[davidgillon]

Absolutely. The self-help industry conflates well-being and wealth, and they really aren't remotely the same thing.

[recessional]

And I think that "wealth" here has a lot to do with status and showing the correct signs of status.

[indywind]

Yes, I think that's on the nose. Or the market focus, if not necessarily wealth as such, is a kind of performative status of "health" that's dependent on and tied up with wealth and other kinds of privilege. It's the kind of "health" that overlaps so much with material "success" that the Venn diagram is nearly a circle.

[staranise]

I was going to comment on this because I agree/am in a similar place inasmuch as my goal has always been to be a happier, healthier person, but then when I thought about how it applies to my work and how much of my work is talking people out of self-destructive optimization, I got a really ugly intrusive thought about that process as a visceral visual metaphor, which is perhaps a sign that I should come back to this conversation... later, when I've processed some stuff.

[davidgillon]

Absolutely.

[silveradept]

Okay, yes, I see this, and I see where they are coming from, and I can see where my own ideas about self-optimization are less in line with being a healthy human and more in relentlessly purging anything that doesn't fit the ideal, so this is a useful counterpoint.

[fyreharper]

<3

(I kind of get this in both directions. On the one hand, slowly learning some of the places where... it is not worth it to sacrifice myself in pursuit of meeting unrealistic expectations. Where I do not owe that to my job. And on the other hand... maybe if I could optimize enough, I could manage to fit into this overachieving-neurotypical-shaped slot just enough to not have to deal with the conflict of... not fitting those expectations.)(we do not really have enough of a safety net for me to opt out of this game. I am glad that you do, even it it's taken a lot of fighting the system to get there)

[lokifan]

That makes a lot of sense.

I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question

I have this all the time. Particularly when people talk about people "always" using particular words wrongly (mansplaining, queerbating) and I'm like... hmm I have no way to know if this is actually something that happens loads - I've definitely seen it sometimes - or if you're just not down for people having labels to describe these things.