Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han finds something similar in a piece by Peter Handke called “Essay on Tiredness.” Handke compares “divisive tiredness,”22 the isolating exhaustion of burnout, with a more resigned “tiredness that trusts in the world” (or surrenders to a lake). Too worn out to grasp, and forced to sit back, the tired and resigned person finds that something else floods in: the world, in all its detail, its constantly acting and infinitely dispersed agents, and its minute-by-minute changes. Handke writes, “My tiredness articulated the muddle of crude perception … and with the help of rhythms endowed it with form—form as far as the eye could see.” Like Josef Pieper’s leisure, this “tiredness” is an inherently destabilizing experience, a loss of individual power that helps us find a home in something larger. Han adds to Handke’s observation that “deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges.”