๐ค If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?
Image: Exhaustion means youโre working hard, and working hard means youโre good.
Hanโs slender essay reads like a diagnosis of our psychic economy. The disciplinary society of ‘thou shalt’ has dissolved into the achievement society of ‘yes, I can’. We no longer rebel against authority; we internalise it, polishing our exhaustion until it gleams like ambition. Productivity replaces purpose. Rest becomes guilt. The subject, stripped of exterior constraint, now self-flagellates in the name of freedom.
We exploit ourselves and think we are free.
What Han captures is not mere fatigue but a civilisational pathology: the compulsion to optimise the self as though it were capital. Burnout is not the collapse of will but the logical conclusion of unlimited permission.
If liberation now feels indistinguishable from exhaustion, what exactly have we been freed from?
From the series Readings in Late Exhaustion โ a Philosophics reflection on the maladies of modernity.
About the Series โ Readings in Late Exhaustion
These cards belong to Readings in Late Exhaustion, a Philosophics project tracing the psychic and cultural costs of late capitalism.
Each card interprets a contemporary work of critical theory through the language of collectable gameplay, where identity, labour, and value become quantified acts.
The format itself is the critique: a system of self-expenditure disguised as achievement, reflection rendered as performance.
Well, not so much hard as not particularly or inherently enjoyable.
I estimate I’ve got about a day left to complete this manuscript โ ‘done’ done. When I open InDesign, it shames me โ 3 days ago, I last touched this document. It doesn’t feel like 3 days have passed, but time flies.
On the right is an older version. I began reworking it into this new version over the summer, and here I am come autumn. It’s even worse if I use the Chinese calendar. Evidently, 7th November is the first day of winter. They can’t wait until soltace.
Anyway, just a brief update. This isn’t going to edit itself, and I can’t afford to pay an editor for a passion project. Besides โ and let’s be honest โ I can’t afford an editor in general โ or at least can’t cost-justify it โ and all my writing is a passion project.
Of course, editors (and cover artists) insist that one would sell more book if only they were edited or professionally rendered. There is an element of truth to this, but I’ve read some gawdawful books that were professionally edited and published through a traditional publisher, because publishers publish.
Me, I operate on razor-thin margins. Most of my publications haven’t even broken even โ even if I ignore opportunity costs, which I can’t because I’m an economist. Accountants get to play that trick.
This said, I do hire reviewers, editors, and artists in small doses โ homoeopathic as they might be โ and I’ve had mixed results.
I’m rambling
Must really be avoiding the editing processโฆ
Recently, I wanted to redesign the cover of one of my Ridley Park fiction books.
Image Comparison: A Tale of Two Propensities
The cover on the left is the original. It is intentionally a minimal 2-D construction โ a representation of the first section of the book, the first 15 chapters.
The cover on the right is the update. It is also minimalist, representing the second section of Propensity. I’m not sure how I would depict the third section. If it comes to me, I may render a third version.
There’s a story to this. I reached out to some cover artists and told them I was unhappy with my original design but had no visual ideas. I’d leave this to the artist. It turns out that some artists don’t want full control over the design process. I can understand the hesitation.
They asked for covers that I might like, so I researched some covers and saved them to a Pinterest board.
As it turned out, after some inspiration, I decided to render this one myself, too. Hey, I tried.
What happened to the rest of the time?
OK, so there’s more. I also created a video book trailer in the evening.
It was fun enough. Give it a watch. It also represents part one of Propensity.
OK, this time for real. Let me know what you thinkโฆabout anything in particular.
The novel itself asks what happens when humanity creates a device that creates peace on earth. What if behavioural control worked too well?
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flatteningโof desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasnโt designed to stay on this long. But now thereโs no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question resurfaces: What does it mean to behave?
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulseโfor readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Editorial Review
“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.” Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience. Parkโs chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm that mirrors the storyโs disintegrationโscientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its “engineered peace.” Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.
I maintain this blog for two primary reasons: as an archive, and as a forum for engagement.
Philosophy isnโt a mass-market pursuit. Most people are content simply to make it through the day without undue turbulence, and I can hardly blame them. Thinking deeply is not an act of leisure; itโs a luxury product, one that Capitalism would rather you didnโt afford. Even when Iโve been employed, Iโve noticed how wage labour chokes the capacity for art and thought. Warhol may have monetised the tension, but most of us merely survive it.
Video: Sprouting seed. (No audio)
Thatโs why I value engagement โ not the digital pantomime of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, but genuine dialogue. The majority will scroll past without seeing. A few will skim. Fewer still will respond. Those who do โ whether to agree, dissent, or reframe โ remind me why this space exists at all.
To Jason, Julien, Jim, Lance, Nick, and especially Homo Hortus, who has been conversing beneath the recent Freedom post: your engagement matters. You help me think differently, sometimes introducing writers or ideas I hadnโt encountered. We may share only fragments of perspective, but difference is the point. It widens the aperture of thought โ provided I can avoid tumbling into the Dunning-Kruger pit.
And now, a note of quiet satisfaction. A Romanian scholar recently cited my earlier essay, the Metanarrative Problem, in a piece titled Despre cum metanaraศiunile construiesc paradigma ศi influenศeazฤ rฤspunsurile emoศionale โ translation: On How Grand Narratives Shape Paradigms and Condition Our Emotional Responses. That someone, somewhere, found my reflections useful enough to reference tells me this exercise in public thinking is doing what it should: planting seeds in unpredictable soil.
Rather, how to optimise your time commitment to reading.
I came across a digital copy of The Intellectual Origins of Modernity by David Ohana as I was purusing titles on PhilArchive. The title piqued my interest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to reading it. What’s a bloke to do? Feed it to ChatGPT, of course.
Let’s just say, M. GPT was not amused.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
My first question: Is this at least tangential to my work?
Yes, it wanders. He tends to smuggle in parallel intellectual developments (Kantian autonomy, Cartesian doubt, social contract theory) even when theyโre only indirectly related to his main thread. Itโs a common sin in โorigins of modernityโ texts: the net gets cast so wide that causation and correlation start swapping costumes.
If youโre looking for the through-line, itโs probably his effort to show how early modern conceptions of reason metastasised into a moral and political framework, not just an epistemic one. But, yes โ tangential is fair.
Is it more of a superficial survey with some connective tissue?
Thatโs a precise way to put it. Ohanavโs book reads like a well-informed synthesisโcompetent, even elegantโbut not a deep excavation. Heโs stitching together recognizable figures (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume) into a narrative arc about โmodernityโ rather than uncovering new terrain. The connective tissue is mostly thematic rather than argumentative: reason โ autonomy โ secular moral order โ political liberalism.
Itโs a survey that flatters the reader into thinking theyโre tracing the genealogy of modern thought, but it rarely descends into the messy underlayersโsay, the theological anxieties, material conditions, or institutional contexts that actually gave those ideas traction. In short: wide lens, thin soil.
Wow. Not a rousing endorsement.
So in a world of publish or perish, he’s publishing something more approachable than academic?
Exactly. Itโs the kind of book that keeps tenure committees content and undergrads awake. Respectable citations, accessible prose, and a digestible thesis that flatters modernity while hinting at critique.
Heโs not trying to break groundโheโs curating a gallery of the usual suspects and arranging them under good lighting. The prose carries that faint aroma of Routledge house style: serious but safe, just speculative enough to appear bold without alienating reviewers.
In the โpublish or perishโ economy, itโs survival by synthesis.
So closer to an undergraduate project than a grad school thesis?
Pretty much. Itโs polished enough to pass for advanced scholarship if you donโt poke too hard, but structurally itโs more akin to a well-executed upper-level survey paperโambitious in scope, cautious in depth.
He gestures toward big philosophical debates without really committing to any. The text moves like a docent through a museum: โHere we have Descartes, note his influence on Kant; over here, the Enlightenmentโs moral optimism, soon to be critiqued by Nietzscheโmoving onโฆโ
You can tell heโs read widely, but the apparatus of argumentโarchival work, textual analysis, theoretical riskโis minimal. Itโs competent, not adventurous.
Freedom is a word so overused itโs practically anaemic. Everyone wants it; no one agrees on what it means. Itโs been weaponised by tyrants and revolutionaries alike, invoked to justify both the breaking of chains and their reforging in a different metal.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
As I write this, I have just finished Erich Fromm’s A Sane Society. Without derailing this post, he cited a scenario โ a description of work communities given in All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop โ where in post-WW2 France, a group formed a sort of workers’ coรถperative โ but it was more than that; it was an anarchosyndicalist experiment. As I read it, I had to cringe at the power ‘voluntary’ transfers that immediately got me thinking of Foucault’s biopower โ as I often do. Saving this for a separate post.
Image: Freedom: The Chains That Bind Us Together Card 006 from the Postmodern Set โ Philosophics.blog
This Critical Theory parody card, Freedom, draws its lineage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose paradox still haunts the modern condition: โMan is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.โ The card re-enchants that contradiction โ an Enchantment โ Social Contract that reminds us liberty isnโt a state but a negotiation.
The card reads:
At the beginning of each playerโs upkeep, that player may remove a Binding counter from a permanent they control. Creatures you control canโt be tapped or sacrificed by spells or abilities your opponent controls.
This is Rousseauโs dilemma made mechanical. Freedom is not absolute; itโs procedural. The upkeep represents the maintenance of the social contractโan ongoing renewal, not a one-time event. Every player begins their turn by negotiating what freedom costs. You may remove one Binding counter, but only if you recognise that binding exists.
The flavour text underlines Rousseauโs plea:
โTo renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.โ
Freedom, for Rousseau, wasnโt about doing whatever one pleased. It was about participating in the moral and civic order that gives action meaning. To exist outside that order is not liberty; itโs anarchy, the tyranny of impulse.
The card, therefore, resists the naรฏve libertarian reading of freedom as the absence of restraint. It instead depicts freedom as the capacity to act within and through shared constraints.
Freedom, then, is not the absence of chains, but the power to choose which ones we wear.
โ Philosophics.blog
The art shows a ring of robed figures, hand in hand, their chains forming a circle beneath a clearing sky. Itโs a haunting image: freedom through fellowship, bondage through unity. The circle symbolises Rousseauโs idea that true liberty emerges only when individuals subordinate selfish will to the general will โ the common interest formed through collective agreement.
Yet thereโs also a postmodern irony here: circles can be prisons too. The social contract can emancipate or suffocate, depending on who wrote its terms. The same chains that protect can also bind.
The monochrome aesthetic amplifies the ambiguity โ freedom rendered in greyscale, neither utopia nor despair, but the space in between.
Rousseauโs notion of the social contract was revolutionary, but its dissonance still resonates: how can one be free and bound at the same time? He answered that only through the voluntary participation in a collective moral order can humans transcend mere instinct.
We might say that todayโs democracies still operate under Freedom (Enchantment โ Social Contract). We maintain our rights at the cost of constant negotiation: legal, social, linguistic. Every โBinding counterโ removed is the product of civic upkeep. Stop maintaining it, and the enchantment fades.
The card hints at the price of this enchantment: creatures (citizens) canโt be tapped or sacrificed by opponentsโ control. In other words, autonomy is secured only when the system prevents external domination. But systems fail, and when they do, the illusion of freedom collapses into coercion.
Rousseau earns a complicated respect in my philosophical canon. Heโs not in my top five, but heโs unavoidable. His concept of freedom through the social contract anticipates both modern liberalism and its critique. He believed that genuine liberty required moral community โ a notion now eroded by hyper-individualism.
Freedom, as Iโve rendered it here, isnโt celebration. Itโs lamentation. The card is about the fragility of the social spell that keeps chaos at bay. We remove one binding at a time, hoping not to unbind ourselves entirely.
Erich Frommโs The Sane Society turns seventy this year, and like a ghost of reason past, it refuses to leave. His target was Capitalismโข โ not merely as an economic system, but as a psychic infection. Replace the word factory with Zoom call, and his diagnosis reads like yesterdayโs corporate newsletter. Weโve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Aside from its psychobabble, The Sane Society, published in 1954, reads almost like it could have been written in 2024. I’d go out on a limb and claim it will still be relevant in 2054 โ because Capitalismโข and the relationship it creates between humans and machines, and humans and other humans. It’s a divisive ideology. I’ve read a lot of content on employee engagement in the past decade. I’d been exposed to it in my Organisational Behaviour courses in the late ’80s. Things were going to change. We’d plotted a future.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Only nothing material has changed. We pretended to notice the problem and fix it, but the people reporting the issue and the people in charge did not share a worldview. And the young managers who were taught about the challenge were either not promoted or changed their tune to facilitate their own promotion. Funny how the selection process favours groupthink over diversity of opinion.
Video: Apathetic Office Worker
On balance, most people tend to hate or be otherwise dissatisfied with their jobs. This is nothing new. It was true before Fromm’s book, and it is true now. I published a series of posts on prostitutionin 2018 and discovered that escorts had better job satisfaction than the larger population. Let that sink in.
‘โฆthe vast majority of the population work as employees with little skill required, and with almost no chance to develop any particular talents, or to show any outstanding achievements. While the managerial or professional groups have at least considerable interest in achieving something more or less personal, the vast majority sell their physical, or an exceedingly small part of their intellectual capacity to an employer to be used for purposes of profit in which they have no share, for things in which they have no interest, with the only purpose of making a living, and for some chance to satisfy their consumer’s greed.
‘Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of futility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation. This socially patterned syndrome of pathology may not be in the awareness of people; it may be covered by a frantic flight into escape activities, or by a craving for more money, power, prestige. But the weight of the latter motivations is so great only because the alienated person cannot help seeking for such compensations for his inner vacuity, not because these desires are the “natural” or most important incentives for work.‘
Fromm, ever the optimist, thought alienation might be cured through self-awareness and communal values. The twentieth century politely ignored him, opting instead for mindfulness apps and performance reviews.
Weโve upgraded our machines but not our misery.
I’ve excised the psychobabble, but he continuesโฆ
‘But even the data on conscious job satisfaction are rather telling. In a study about job satisfaction on a national scale, satisfaction with and enjoyment of their job was expressed by 85 per cent of the professionals and executives, by 64 per cent of whitecollar people, and by 41 per cent of the factory workers. In another study, we find a similar picture: 86 per cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per cent of the commercial employees, 56 per cent of the skilled, and 48 per cent of the semi-skilled workers expressed satisfaction.
‘We find in these figures a significant discrepancy between professionals and executives on the one hand, workers and clerks on the other. Among the former only a minority is dissatisfiedโamong the latter, more than half. Regarding the total population, this means, roughly, that over half of the total employed population is consciously dissatisfied with their work, and do not enjoy it. If we consider the unconscious dissatisfaction, the percentage would be considerably higher. Taking the 85 per cent of “satisfied” professionals and executives, we would have to examine how many of them suffer from psychologically determined high blood pressure, ulcers, insomnia, nervous tension and fatigue. Although there are no exact data on this, there can be no doubt that, considering these symptoms, the number of really satisfied persons who enjoy their work would be much smaller than the above figures indicate.
‘As far as factory workers and office clerks are concerned, even the percentage of consciously dissatisfied people is remarkably high. Undoubtedly the number of unconsciously dissatisfied workers and clerks is much higher. This is indicated by several studies which show that neurosis and psychogenic illnesses are the main reasons for absenteeism (the estimates for the presence of neurotic symptoms among factory workers go up to about 50 per cent). Fatigue and high labor turnover are other symptoms of dissatisfaction and resentment.’
In the twenty-first century, job dissatisfaction has increased even more. To me, it’s interesting to consider how many people harken back to the ‘good old days’, yet there is little evidence to support the view. Almost schizophrenically, others look to the promise of the future and technology, yet this is simply another narrative with no basis in fact.
The irony is that weโve automated everything except fulfilment. Even our dissatisfaction has become efficient โ streamlined, quantified, and monetised. Fromm warned that the sickness of society was its sanity. On that front, weโre positively thriving.
If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.
โDonโt ask for the meaning; ask for the use.โ
โ Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isnโt just homage; itโs confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life โ to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.
The cardโs text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering โ a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.
To โcounterโ a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse โ to negate, clarify, define. To โreframe it as metaphorโ is the continental alternative โ reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.
The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how theyโre used โ by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgensteinโs point was brutally simple: thereโs no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.
The Shattered Face
The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as itโs formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.
I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. Itโs communication as combustion.
Wittgensteinโs Echo
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesnโt change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see whatโs already there.
He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and theyโll tell you what they mean.
In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation โ to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.
Personal Reflection
Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.
His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language โ its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.
To play Language Game is to remember that communication isnโt about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.
The cardโs instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.
I created a “Book Club Edition” of Propensity, a Ridley Park book of fiction primarily for the European market โ specifically in the UK โ though it’s available elsewhere. I altered the cover art. As an author, I also wanted to compare KDP and IngramSpark as printers and distributors.
I find the cover texture on this version interesting, but I don’t have a word to describe it. I like it. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about it โ the texture. I reworked the art to track the second section of the book. The original cover tracks the first section.
Image: Propensity by Ridley Park; original book cover
At least in this proof version, the black ink is not 100% and is streaky. The KDP version is 100% K and solid black. I mightn’t have noticed except that some section division pages were mostly black, and it is quite evident. I don’t discern a difference in the quality of the text itself.
Illusion of Light
The Illusion of Light is a cloth version of a book also available in paperback. I like the cloth-bound. There is a nostalgic elegance about it. It feels durable โ more so than a paperback for sure. I’m not sure about versus the case laminate versions. They come off like textbooks to me โ not the vibe I am aiming for.
Itโs almost endearing, really how the intellectuals of mid-century Europe mistook the trembling of their own cage for the dawn chorus of freedom. Reading Erich Frommโs The Sane Society today feels like being handed a telegram from Modernismโs last bright morning, written in the earnest conviction that history had finally grown up. The war was over, the worker was unionised, the child was unspanked, and the libido โ good heavens โ was finally allowed to breathe. What could possibly go wrong?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Fromm beams:
โIn the twentieth century, such capitalistic exploitation as was customary in the nineteenth century has largely disappeared. This must not, however, becloud the insight into the fact that twentieth-century as well as nineteenth-century Capitalism is based on the principle that is to be found in all class societies: the use of man by man.โ
The sleight of hand is marvellous. He spots the continuation of exploitation but calls it progress. The worker has become a ‘partner’, the manager a ‘team leader’, and the whip has been replaced by a time card. No one bows anymore, he writes. No, they just smile through performance reviews and motivational posters.
Frommโs optimism borders on metaphysical comedy.
โAfter the First World War, a sexual revolution took place in which old inhibitions and principles were thrown overboard. The idea of not satisfying a sexual wish was supposed to be old-fashioned or unhealthy.โ
Ah yes, the Jazz Age orgy of liberation โ champagne, Freud, and flapper hemlines. The problem, of course, is that every generation mistakes its new neuroses for freedom from the old ones. Frommโs โsexual revolutionโ was barely a shuffle in the bourgeois bedroom; Beauvoirโs Deuxiรจme Sexe arrived the next year, practically shouting across the cafรฉ table that liberation was still a myth stitched into the same old corset.
Beauvoir, at least, sensed the trap: every gesture toward freedom was refracted through patriarchal fantasy, every ‘choice’ conditioned by the invisible grammar of domination. Fromm, bless him, still believed in a sane society โ as if sanity were something history could deliver by instalment.
Meanwhile, the Existentialists were in the next room, chain-smoking and muttering that existence precedes essence. Freedom, they insisted, wasnโt something achieved through social reform but endured as nausea. Post-war Paris reeked of it โ half despair, half Gauloises. And within a decade, the French schools would dismantle the very scaffolding that held Frommโs optimism together: truth, progress, human nature, the subject.
The Modernists thought they were curing civilisation; the Post-Moderns knew it was terminal and just tried to describe the symptoms with better adjectives.
So yes, Frommโs Sane Society reads now like a time capsule of liberal humanist faith โ this touching belief that the twentieth century would fix what the nineteenth broke. Beauvoir already knew better, though even she couldnโt see the coming avalanche of irony, the final revelation that emancipation was just another product line.
Liberation became a brand, equality a slogan, sanity a statistical average. Frommโs dream of psychological health looks quaint now, like a health spa brochure left in the ruins of a shopping mall.
And yet, perhaps itโs precisely that naivety thatโs worth cherishing. For a moment, they believed the world could be cured with reason and compassion โ before history reminded them, as it always does, that man is still using man, only now with friendlier UX design and better lighting.
Philosophics 