I have finally read "The Burnout Society" by Byung-Chul Han.
Overall, the book is about the culture of overachievement, the inability to stop, the excess of "positivity," and how modern culture produces fatigue. But most of all, I was struck by a completely different idea.

It seems we live in a culture where pausing and deep immersion in anything have become almost impossible.
We are seemingly free. We can choose our profession, our place of residence, our relationships, our lifestyle. But along with this freedom comes a new coercion: because you can, it means you must, and you must do more. Otherwise, you are simply not trying hard enough.

And so, freedom turns out to be a new form of coercion. It forces us to endlessly reinvent ourselves, and we run in circles like hamsters on a wheel because the bar itself is constantly being pushed further away.

But even that wasn't what struck me the most. Han writes that we are losing the capacity for deep attention.
Everything around us demands constant presence: switching quickly, keeping several processes in sight at once, constantly reacting to new stimuli. Han compares this to the behavior of an animal that must eat while simultaneously ensuring another beast doesn't bite its behind or steal its young.

Such attention is very broad. But almost always flat and superficial. And over time, it exhausts us.

This is precisely why it is becoming difficult to read complex books or watch slow movies. To engage in one thing long enough for it to begin revealing itself from a new angle. Even to simply tolerate boredom. Yet, boredom is not always the enemy. Sometimes it turns out to be the space where something new is born. As long as we don't fill every single pause with yet another task.

Han recalls Paul Cézanne. He used to say that to paint a picture, he wanted to "see the scent of things"; he would freeze and gaze, as if growing into the landscape, becoming its consciousness. For this, one needs to linger long enough to stop looking at the object and begin being with it, understanding its essence.

Perhaps freedom doesn't begin when we are able to react to everything. But rather, when we can allow ourselves not to react.

In a world where everything demands our attention, the ability not to respond to every single impulse becomes almost a form of resistance.

And the fatigue of our time is not only about us doing too much. It is also about the fact that we have almost forgotten how to stop.