To understand Han properly, one has to see that he is not writing a single complaint in many variations. He is constructing a system of linked diagnoses, each one extending the others. The point of his later books is to show that burnout, transparency, digital overconnection, and the fading of ritual all belong to one ecology of excess. The modern subject is not broken by scarcity but by an overdose of stimulation without depth.
This is why Han’s writing often feels less like a sequence of essays than a diagnostic grid. A reader moving from The Burnout Society to Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, then to The Disappearance of Rituals and The Scent of Time, encounters a recurring pattern: a social form first appears as liberation, then as obligation, and finally as exhaustion. The pattern is not accidental. Han’s system depends on the claim that contemporary power is most effective when it presents itself as freedom. What looks like choice is often the internalization of a demand.
One key term in this system is Leistungszwang, the compulsion toward performance or achievement. Han uses it to describe a world in which one is driven less by direct prohibition than by the imperative to realize potential continuously. The self becomes a project to be improved, tracked, displayed, and compared. A useful illustration is the corporate culture that rewards “ownership” and “initiative” while expecting workers to internalize the company’s goals as personal ambition. Another is the fitness app that turns bodily care into a daily audit. In both cases, discipline is privatized and then moralized. The point is not simply that people work hard, but that the criteria of worth migrate inward. One is no longer merely judged from outside; one learns to judge oneself by metrics that feel self-chosen.
This helps explain Han’s distinction between the disciplinary society and what he calls the achievement society. It is a historical claim, not just a slogan. It suggests that power has changed its preferred instruments. Instead of forbidding movement, it multiplies opportunities; instead of enforcing obedience through negativity, it saturates life with positivity. The surprising implication is that freedom and pressure can intensify together. The subject, congratulated for being autonomous, becomes more governable than before because governance now travels through desire. The old image of power as a wall or a no-entry sign gives way to something more ambient: prompts, encouragements, rankings, and permanent availability.
Han extends this logic into his account of psychopolitics, especially in work such as Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Here he argues that contemporary power is intimate, data-driven, and self-activating. It no longer merely disciplines the body; it mines preference, attention, and mood. A shopper clicking through recommendations, a user scrolling a feed shaped by invisible ranking, or a commuter whose every gesture leaves a digital trace: these are not isolated examples but signs of a regime in which behavior is anticipated and nudged before it is consciously chosen. The evidence Han emphasizes is not dramatic repression but the quiet accumulation of traceable life. The device is not only the object in the hand; it is the infrastructure of measurement behind it.
The stakes of this argument are clear in the everyday scenes he selects. The worker who checks messages late at night is not simply overcommitted; he is inhabiting a temporal order in which the boundary between work and rest has been erased. The user who opens a platform to socialize enters a system where sociality itself is quantified, sorted, and made legible to others and to the platform. Han’s concern is that the contemporary subject is not merely watched. The subject is induced to participate in the production of the very data by which it becomes knowable. This is why his account of digital life carries a forensic edge: the ledger is kept by the subject as much as by the system.
Yet Han’s system is not only negative. He is also trying to recover capacities that modern acceleration threatens to destroy. One of these is contemplation. In some of his later essays he contrasts vita activa with forms of quiet attention that resist pure utility. Another is ritual, which he treats as a way of stabilizing time against the endless freshness of the feed. A wedding, a holiday, a repeated custom, or even the formal opening of a lecture: such things create rhythms that save experience from becoming merely consumable novelty. Ritual matters because it binds time to memory and memory to form. It slows the self enough for orientation to be possible.
This concern becomes especially clear in The Disappearance of Rituals, where Han argues that modern life has thinned the shared forms through which communities give time shape and meaning. A birthday celebrated by immediate posting, or a meal photographed before it is eaten, may be social in a technical sense, but it often lacks the density of repetition and shared orientation that ritual once carried. His complaint is not nostalgia for the past in general, but a fear that without symbolic forms, experience turns into disposable information. What vanishes is not only ceremony but the spacing that allowed people to dwell together in time.
He makes a similar move in The Scent of Time, where time itself is the damaged medium. Digital life fragments duration into punctual stimuli; time no longer gathers itself into narrative or inwardness. The result is not mere busyness but temporal homelessness. People may have constant contact with information and still have no place to stand inside their own days. The problem is not simply that time passes quickly, but that it ceases to accumulate into a lived continuity. One task, one alert, one refresh follows another, and the day becomes a sequence without thickness.
Two illustrations sharpen the point. First, the exhausted manager who is praised for being “agile” and “resilient” discovers that every improvement becomes a new baseline. The horizon recedes as soon as it is reached. Second, the social-media user who seeks community through visibility finds that visibility itself can hollow out presence; being seen is not the same as being with others. In both cases, the apparent reward contains its own depletion. Achievement produces more demand. Connection produces more exposure. The system feeds on the very successes it seems to promise.
This is why Han’s later work has the structure of a closed circuit. Labor, friendship, attention, learning, and even silence are implicated. The same logic that turns the worker into an entrepreneurial self also turns the friend into a contact, the learner into a data point, and reflection into another consumable mode of self-optimization. At this stage the logic appears complete: self-exploitation, digital capture, temporal fragmentation, and the loss of ritual all reinforce one another. But a system that comprehensive invites resistance. The next question is whether Han’s picture is as total as it seems, or whether it overstates the case in ways that matter.