Episode 232 - Transcript

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This! Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophize this on there. Hope you love the show today.

So Byung Chul Han is a bit of a fan favorite on this podcast. Lots of emails sent almost two years ago when we did a couple episodes on his work. And since then he’s released a couple more books.

The one today is called The Crisis of Narration. And as your philosophical sherpa here’s my take about how to best approach this book: to me it seems there’s two big pieces of his argument. One is a description of something big that’s CHANGED about the world we live in. And the other is the existential COST…that people have to pay living IN this new world…the PEOPLE there being US.

That’s how I’m going to structure this episode today: I’ll kind of swap between first describing the world he depicts. Then I’ll explain the cost of it.

Just know that throughout ALL of this…Byung Chul Han is setting his sights on what he sees as an absolutely SICKENING decline… of storytelling.

A decline that has CHANGED what it is to be a PERSON in today’s world. Hence the name of the book. The Crisis of Narration.

So out of respect for your time I’ll get right into it: human beings are often described as narrative creatures. We’ve all HEARD this before.

For our entire HISTORY…STORIES… have been a HUGE part of the way we relate to the world around us. From tribal elders, that would pass wisdom down from generation to generation. To the stories they’d tell about the ORIGINS of that tribe… and where their people descend from.

Fast forward and you have religious stories that root people in their place in the universe and the afterlife. You see this in Polytheism all the way to the Abrahamic religions.

We even have stories of the LORE…that BINDS a particular area of people together under one heading: I am a Spartan, people will say for example. And that MEANS something to me in terms of where I come from and what I am now.

Stories…have been, and still ARE, a CRITICAL piece of what it is to be a person.

But something happened to our stories right about the beginning of the 20th century.

Byung Chul Han, whenever he writes a book, USUALLY has a philosopher that he’s deeply reading at the time, turning the volume up on their work, and then reinterpreting their ideas to better understand the present time. The one in THIS book in particular… is Walter Benjamin, who we’ve ALSO done a few episodes on for this podcast.

And for any of you out there… who maybe DON’T remember perfectly something you listened to five years ago: Walter Benjamin’s one of these philosophers who’s looking at the modern world that’s emerging in the 1930’s…and much LIKE Han… he’s trying to describe it, and then talk about the changes that are going to go on in the lives of the people that are LIVING in it.

Modern industrialized life…has CHANGED what it is to be a person to Benjamin. So has the explosion of people moving into cities, and city LIFE. So has the rise of newspapers and mass media more generally with cinema and radio.

Now ALL of these things he noted…TRAIN people… to engage with the world at a particular depth. For example, city life tends to make people more reactive, it has more anonymous social encounters, horns honking, overstimulation…it’s all very immediate and sensory when you live in a city…and the point is it takes a real effort by an individual to form DEEP connections in that new kind of environment.

When it comes to mass media…he says people are trained to JUMP from headline to headline…NOT necessarily getting a deep connection with what’s going ON in the world…but just seeking NOVELTY. Again, stimulation. Same thing goes for cinema and radio.

And he has a famous quote that Byung Chul Han uses in the book to DESCRIBE this situation in modernity. Walter Benjamin says that people are more interested in a fire in a Paris attic…than they are a revolution that’s going on in Madrid.

And what he’s DOING there is marking a distinction…between two different kinds of very human experiences. One is more immediate and superficial. The other requires more narrative context and reflection.

The fire in the Paris attic…it’s right there. It’s a fire, it’s really hot. Oh my god someone’s gonna lose their home. How scandalous and horrible this is, it’s an IMMEDIATE emotional reaction that takes basically no thought.

But the revolution in Madrid…well that one’s a bit SLOWER to appreciate and understand. You have to appreciate the history there, the politics that are going on, the STRUGGLE of the people involved— to understand the significance of this moment…it takes work, reflection and it takes understanding the moment in terms of a STORY.

REAL STORIES, for Byung Chul Han, are a critical access point human beings have…to a deep, meaningful connection with the world we LIVE in. Nothing quite does this like a STORY does it for, Han.

And that’s because real stories…are things that are always linking past, present and future together in a way that’s significant to us. A story is something that helps the person RECEIVING it… make sense of who they are…what might still be POSSIBLE in their life. A story is something that a person LIVES through he says…and he’s NOT saying that life IS a story, but that STORY, structures the events of our lives.

Stories require listening, a bit of patience to hear them. They require time and reflection.

And maybe the most important thing about a story is that it can be shared with others; a story is something that BINDS people together into a tradition, in a way that helps give people direction.

Now WHATEVER it is we just described there…Han thinks we have FAR LESS of it today than we ever have had before. And THIS…is the slow moving ARC…of what has CHANGED in our world since the beginning of the 20th century to Byung Chul Han. We have FAR LESS time where we stop, listen to a story, think about it, reflect in terms of our place within it, consider what it MEANS for us and our lives…in other words: we don’t have real STORIES anymore. We have cheap alternatives.

In fact, the situation is ACTUALLY far more serious than that for Byung Chul Han. Because the world is NO LONGER LIKE the world of Walter Benjamin…. where it just TRAINS us to not reflect deeper about what’s going on. The point he’s making… is that the world WE live in, in 2025…is deliberately HOSTILE to this whole process of storytelling— to that slower, deeper understanding of the events around us.

Think about what it’s like to live today and BE someone on one of these social media apps. You have Instagram Stories. Ayy, whaddya mean we don’t got STORIES Byung Chul Han…it’s RIGHT THERE in the NAME!

But these aren’t STORIES. Stories for Han, again, meaningfully link together…the past, present and the future. And stories are SELECTIVE by the way… when they DO this. Stories are just as much about what’s NOT said in them…as what’s SAID in them. That’s because stories require an element of mystery, or tension. It’s about NOT saying CERTAIN details…to GIVE more meaning to the things that ARE said.

But Instagram stories. there’s no past present and future there. They disappear after 24 hours. And think of the PROMPT that these tech companies GIVE you when asking you to create this content for them: “tell me what’s going on right now!” Give me exactly what’s happening…with no context.

What you get are not stories then…but a bunch of fragmented present moments…usually with someone filming themselves in the middle of some VANITY project they’re on. Look how smart I am, everybody LISTEN to me right now. Look how good I look. Look at how great my life is look at this eggs benedict that was made JUST for me.

Also something to consider is when someone records their life like this…it’s all…RIGHT THERE. Just like the fire in the Paris attic. There’s no selection, no THOUGHT required…just in your face, DATA about your life…where you take a bunch of separate, present MOMENTS…and never link them TOGETHER into any sort of meaningful whole.

And that’s because these apps…TRANSPARENTLY for Han…are not DESIGNED for you to discover a STORY you fit into. These apps are designed to generate DATA…out of the events of your life.

The goal of these platforms is to keep people operating at a level where they don’t stop to reflect on anything. Consider how the next video…just AUTO plays…I mean heaven forbid you’d have ten seconds to think about what you just saw and what it means within a larger story.

This is the ANTONYM to storytelling.

Consider that the ideal CUSTOMER for one of these apps is someone who sits around scrolling, they have an emotional reaction to what they see, don’t stop and think about it at all, but just keep on scrolling to the NEXT thing they’re gonna have an emotional reaction to.

The algorithm will HAPPILY SERVE UP what they KNOW you’re gonna endlessly scroll through… to MINIMIZE the amount of time you’re spending OFF the app. And if you dare to go OFF the app, gah, good luck going five minutes without them sending you a notification to come back, FURTHER fragmenting your attention.

This is the CLIMATE…that tech companies want people LIVING in. Stuck in an overly emotional state, incapable of reflecting deeper, passively, reacting to videos all day long in a way that makes you the most trackable and exploitable for THEM. And again, this isn’t JUST, TRAINING people to value shallow bits of novelty everyday, THAT would be bad enough…this is actively HOSTILE to reflection, and developing a deeper connection with things through story.

But there’s ANOTHER element of storytelling that slowly atrophies in a climate like this: memory.

To have a story that is so meaningful to you that it lives inside of your memories. To be able to recall a story from memory and TELL other people AROUND you… these are things that don’t EXIST in the same way that they USED to for Han.

I mean memory was HOW stories used to be passed down from generation to generation. But today:

There’s no need to fully remember a, VIDEO you saw, for example…when you can just save it on your phone and PLAY it for the person you want to show it to. There’s no need to be fully present in a moment, taking in a scene, remembering what’s meaningful about it…when you can just take a picture and supposedly reLIVE the moment on your digital photo album.

This is outsourcing something our MEMORY has always done for us… to file storage on a phone. To a filing cabinet.

Now what could be WRONG with that, I’m sorry Han that it’s not 1945 anymore. Well the PROBLEM with it is that it’s an entire piece of our lives that’s now being handled by something that we THINK might be providing the same service…but it ISN’T providing the same service.

Memory to Han, like STORIES…is selective. You don’t remember EVERYTHING about an experience you have. You have to BE there IN a moment, interpreting it…and you’re always linking very selective events… to some kind of narrative that is meaningful to you.

This is work we do that helps us feel CONNECTED to the EVENTS of our life.

But it’s a VERY DIFFERENT thing than saving a PICTURE on your phone.

A picture on your phone is a type of total recall: meaning the picture of the moment is always just…THERE. Right in front of you. Fire in an attic. There’s no distance, there’s no storytelling…this is a fragment of a moment…this is just STORED in an ARCHIVE as DATA…with no context.

And the norm of CATALOGING our memories this way…CHANGES the way that people experience memories, for Han.

In the book he uses the example of the Black Mirror episode called The Entire History of You…maybe you’ve seen it…it’s where people have these implants that RECORD everything they see and hear…so in the episode there’s never any REASON for them to REMEMBER anything. They can just play it back.

The point is that we’re living in a pseudo version of this right now with the way that people outsource their memories to some archive on the internet.

What you’d expect to see if he’s right here…are people that DO a lot of STUFF…but if you asked them to recall what they did… they wouldn’t really have that strong of a memory of the stuff that happened. They can remember WHAT they did… but it’s a little hazy. When they talk about it they just sort of list things that happened that day, but don’t FEEL a deep connection to any of it really.

COUPLE this with the lack of real stories more GENERALLY…and what you’d expect to SEE are people that get a lot done at work, they do things with their family…but the feeling is: they don’t really have ANY idea what ANY of this is all about. How this connects to ME and who I AM. How I’m connected to ANYTHING else BUT me. The FEAR is I’m just gonna keep doing stuff, LOTS of stuff undeniably day after day…until one morning I wake up and I’m 60…and I’ve just strung a lot of these DAYS together without them feeling like they make ANY sense in terms of a STORY that my life WAS.

The crisis of narration then, for Byung Chul Han, IS a crisis of the self, as well.

We’ll get BACK to the existential dread section of this DON’T YOU WORRY, if you’re CRAVING some more of that. But I feel the need to give a COUNTER point here that at least a FEW of you must be thinking out there: uh, what if I DO feel like I’m living in the middle of an amazing story.

Look I live in a world that has pandemics, and rocket ships, and political events… that would put Julius Caesar in the fetal position doing that anxious rocking motion when he’s having a manic episode. WW3…is something people are actually talking about…that doomsday clock thing…I don’t know how many seconds there are left… but it’s not many.

In other words: I don’t get my meaningful stories from social media, Byung Chul Han…I get them from the NEWS. And there’s PLENTY of events going on THERE that I don’t NEED any other way to connect my identity to a story.

Han would probably answer this person in two parts: the FIRST part of it he’d say…is that what you’re consuming there, AS you’re following the news…is mostly information…not stories.

MOST of it is people getting a piece of information about something going on somewhere in the world…then emotionally reacting to it…and moving onto the NEXT story that tells them something ELSE that’s going on. Does that SOUND at all FAMILIAR to what we were just talking about?

Most news, especially in its 24/7 digital form… is a bunch of fragmented, bits of information. Where what we can expect…is that just like a social media post…it’ll be GREAT at giving you an emotional reaction in the moment if that’s what you’re looking for… but it’ll become DIFFICULT for you to LINK this information to ANY sort of meaningful narrative.

The news, to Han, just SCARES people mostly…it exposes them to the problems of EVERY person on the ENTIRE globe…their body REACTS to HEARING this news…and then 15 minutes later when they’re still anxious, their body STILL reacting to the news they just read…well, THEY’VE already moved on in their head to five OTHER fragments of information, that are DESIGNED to try to get an emotional reaction out of them as well.

Once again part of the PROBLEM here is that there’s not enough DISTANCE, for Han. He calls this a “gaplessness” we experience. When information is just thrown in your face, and when there’s no time to let the experience settle and to reflect on what it means before the app is suggesting yet ANOTHER thing for you to emotionally react to…how is ANYONE supposed to LINK these events to a story that involves THEM?

Now for the SECOND part of this answer…to the person that says I DO feel like I’m a part of these events…Han might ask you to consider this: is this YOUR STORY? Is this a story that REALLY involves you? Or… is this a story you’ve been SOLD by people that benefit from you believing in it?

It’s not meant to be harsh. It’s meant to get us examining our standards because of the sad reality of the POVERTY we all live in… when it comes to STORIES in today’s world.

We CRAVE stories…

And brands…for the sake of advertising will TELL stories that people glom onto. News outlets will tell stories, optimizing for clicks. Politicians will tell stories that satisfy this URGE that people HAVE for a story…but it’s just so they can get ELECTED…they don’t DO most of the stuff once they get into OFFICE ANYWAY, they just take advantage of how BADLY you want a STORY to believe in.

In fact, the RISE of certain a KIND of story in conspiracy theories…can be explained by there being such a LACK of real stories coming from the political space. When you have an establishment that tells the same BS story for DECADES to people, and more or less just installs a NEW version of the SAME person every single election…well people stop believing in that story. Even things like the MOON being hollow or time traveling lizard people, these start to sound a lot BETTER than just getting raked over the coals for the rest of your life by fake politicians.

Han says we’ve gone from story TELLING…to story SELLING. And you can always tell the difference between a REAL story you’re LIVING through, and a story you’ve been SOLD…because the stories you’ve been SOLD start to resemble OTHER things we’ve talked about so far on this episode.

Stories you’ve been sold start to look like DATA.

Whenever you believe in a story, ASK yourself: is this story something that’s short lived? Where it’s gonna expire at the end of this election cycle or when this product comes out? Is this story easily replaceable…you know, FAR from stories that ground someone’s identity for their entire lifetime…is this story something that you could pretty easily replace tomorrow with yet ANOTHER story these people are telling you, as they REVISE it in real time? IS this story something that gets you to react emotionally…and DOESN’T ever ask you to think critically about the world or reflect on how valid the story is?

We HAVE to ask ourselves these things he thinks…because REAL storytelling, as a form of communication… is uniquely capable of CHALLENGING the limited ways people are SEEING things. To Han, a story told well… gets people to think. It’s risky, he says. It’s part of the process of ANY significant transformation that goes on.

See this is why storytelling…makes up a CRUCIAL piece of how we understand our identities.

StorySELLING on the other hand does SOMETHING of the opposite. It’s about consumption…or emotional manipulation…it just takes the narrative STRUCTURE…the FEEL of a story…and usually uses it to reinforce the existing economic or political system.

There’s another layer to this that may be useful to mention. Because maybe you’re someone who says look I don’t get my stories that I connect with from social media….and I don’t get my stories from politics either. Where I get my stories…is from where they tell stories. From movies and TV shows. THAT’S an area where I find things that I connect with.

And for whatever it’s worth: you can always find EXCEPTIONS to this kind of macro level social commentary…but I think Han would share a criticism that’s pretty COMMON, about MOST things that go on in Hollywood these days. He’d probably say something like the STORIES are mostly GONE from movies and TV shows…and that MANY shows turn into something like an emotionally manipulative, soap opera.

Should be said…this MIRRORS the OTHER things we’ve talked about because it’s the SAME exact TREND. You watch a show…and it mimics the STRUCTURE of storytelling…it LOOKS like you’re being told a story. And just like a social media post or a news article: it FEELS GOOD as you’re WATCHING it…it does EVERYTHING that you WANT it to in the moment.

But eventually what HAPPENS when you’re WATCHING it…is you realize there’s no real STORY. It’s just an elaborate series of relationships between the characters, you know WHO all these characters ARE and their HISTORY together…and then one of them DIES. Or one of them has an AFFAIR. It’s just a soap opera, of immediate emotional manipulation…but no real STORY telling. Just story selling.

Now this story SELLING… DOESN’T just go on at the level of media and politicians. Story selling is something almost ALL of us end up doing… about ourselves as well.

This is going to be connected to his ideas we talked about in his book The Burnout Society.

Quick recap for the sake of context: Byung Chul Han thinks that people in the modern world are controlled by what he calls positive power. Meaning you’re not controlled by a King or Queen that tells you the things you CAN’T do, negative power…people in neoliberal western society are told that they can be ANYTHING…as long as they’re willing to self-improve, optimize themselves, INCREASE their market value.

Han thinks what this produces are a lot of people that are narcissistic, depressed and anxious. Several REASONS for this…I mean first of all this whole setup practically FORCES people to focus on THEMSELVES at an almost biblical LEVEL.

I mean what ELSE do they have to focus on in the absence of outside narratives?

MORE than that they’re told the only reason you’re not a BILLIONAIRE…or EXACTLY where you want to BE in life…is because YOU haven’t put in the work to become VALUABLE enough yet. Every shortcoming you HAVE… is YOUR FAULT, in other words. So people either live in a constant state of inadequacy…or they work really hard to ACHIEVE their WILDEST DREAMS, run into ACTUAL macro-economic hurdles that they can’t control, then they burnout, get depressed for a while only to start back up again when they can summon the inner strength to try. This is the PICTURE of Han’s Burnout Society.

But when everybody becomes their own little narcissistic, personal BRAND they have to promote…in the absence of real stories to connect with at a deep level…STORIES end up becoming the way each of these personal BRANDS weaves a FICTION about who they ARE.

Han says that narration…has been replaced by narrative performance.

And just think about the inversion that’s gone on there in our societies if Han is right here. Instead of stories being the thing that helps us DISCOVER our identities WITHIN a larger unified whole…NOW what we do, is by curating things on social media…we CREATE stories about ourselves…that LOOK like the way we want other people to THINK we are.

You can start to see the picture coming into focus of what Han fears will become an ever more common sight in the world we’re living. Innocent people…with very limited access to real STORIES that help them feel deeply connected to the world…will progressively reduce more and more pieces of their life to data and information. Knowing themselves will just become tracking steps, monitoring their body fat percentage. Events in their life will be reduced to pictures of things they can hardly remember doing. Being informed will be an anxious haze of articles that they can’t ever quite make sense of. Their life will be reduced to metrics and data, not quite sure WHO they are, but they’ll sell the people around them whatever STORY they think is best for their career or their love life right now. ALL of this with us being almost INCAPABLE of talking to EACHOTHER…because we HAVE no mutual STORIES that bind us together.

Referencing Giorgio Agamben’s work…Byung Chul Han calls this a kind of “bare life” that many modern people are at high risk of falling into. And to Byung Chul Han…this is a view of the SELF, that is missing something absolutely critical as well.

See MUCH like STORIES are selective. And MEMORIES are selective…SELFHOOD…is ALSO an incredibly selective process. WHO you ARE…is not something that is EFFICIENT…or TRACKABLE by metrics. It’s a collection of experiences, memories, reflections, relationships, ALL a bunch of things that are LIVED…in relation to a story you HAVE about yourself.

And without the story…you literally LOSE yourself to Han.

Again the DAYS start blending IN to each other, you don’t feel like you know what ANY of this is about. Also, when BAD times come your way inevitably…when you’re hurt by a relationship ending or TRAUMATIZED by an event…how do we HEAL, asks Byung Chul Han, other than with a STORY that helps us INTEGRATE painful experiences into a meaningful whole.

MORE data, and MORE information about yourself he says…CANNOT give a FORM to the ways that you’re suffering. For that, we’re gonna need SOMETHING that makes the suffering COHERENT. And THAT for Han…is going to be a STORY. Yet again, SO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE…are living lives doing things actively HOSTILE to that deeper connection.

He did an interview surrounding the release of this book…and he was answering a question and talked about how he thinks people don’t even LISTEN to each other really anymore. He cites this as yet ANOTHER piece of evidence that something real has CHANGED in our world.

You walk down the street, he says, and basically everyone has headphones in. He tried to STOP someone and ask them for directions one day and they just kept walking…and at FIRST it seemed like they just ignored him, but THEN he realized… they just had headphones in.

I don’t know why that scene is so funny to me. Not only someone missing an opportunity to talk to someone brilliant like Byung Chul Han, but just imagining him standing there, holding his L in the middle of the street as someone ignores him. Then writing a philosophy book about it. It’s just funny to me.

Anyway his POINT is that this person, like MILLIONS of OTHER people LIKE them…have absolutely NO CHANCE of EVER connecting with anything DEEPER… during the time they have those headphones in.

And this CHANGE, in the existential problems that the modern person has to find a solution to…is part of the reason why he says we’re not even Homo Sapiens anymore. He calls us PHONO sapiens, with again, a very different set of PROBLEMS than a Homo Sapien had.

In the book he references an article that was in Wired magazine in the year 2008 by a guy named Chris Anderson. The title of the article was: The End of Theory. And the POINT of it Han says was that look: we’ve had human beings trying to explain stuff for thousands of years at this point. Everyone comes up with a THEORY…that tries to help us understand things like human behavior.

But his point was: with the rise of data metrics and algorithms, AI on the horizon in 2008…we don’t NEED people THEORIZING about stuff anymore…we can just PREDICT what they’re going to do NEXT given the DATA we have about their behavior…let’s do AWAY with all the speculation.

I mean who cares about WHY I'm doing things I’m doing…who CARES about an explanation…when we can just predict exactly what people are going to do?

Well Han, to put it lightly, DISAGREES with this entire article.

He thinks that theory is absolutely crucial. In fact THEORY, he says…is just another word people use for a STORY, that links things together in a meaningful way.

The SAME WAY a person that reduces their life to data is MISSING something important about what it is to be human…the WORLD will be missing something important…without theory being used as a map.

BECAUSE he says: data does a lot of things well. It can tell you THAT two things are happening together. But it can’t tell you what they MEAN. On the other hand theories, like stories, are selective in that regard. A theory doesn’t just DESCRIBE the world… just like a story doesn’t just present a list of events.

A theory selects WHICH parts of the data matter, then arranges them into a logic that is meaningful to us, and then most importantly, a theory INVITES people IN, to SEE themselves WITHIN of a piece of the world.

This is an IMPORTANT part of what stories DO…they help LINK us to the world we live in. And Han thinks it runs the risk of being ELIMINATED…as people put more and more faith into things like AI to be able to fully describe things.

See after reading the article: to Han, AI becomes something like the POSTER child for the technology that is going to allow us to supposedly DO all this. AI becomes a SYMBOL…for the idea that as long as we collect enough data and optimize for what our statistical models tell us…who NEEDS reflection or stories? Or better yet: AI will just be able to reflect FOR us. And then CREATE our stories if we need them.

But Han thinks this is impossible, especially with the current FORM of AI we HAVE.

Han draws the distinction between two concepts from German Idealism here, you have Intelligenz and Geist. Intelligenz is essentially information processing…and Geist is more along the lines of spirit or creativity.

To Byung Chul Han: artificial intelligence…is pure Intelligenz at this point. It processes information at CRAZY levels, it’s WONDERFUL at doing THAT…but it is incapable of doing SEVERAL things that allow for real creativity or storytelling.

If it helps this is along the same lines as the argument we talked about from Noam Chomsky that AI has nothing to do with language…it is glorified auto-complete.

That it’s a probability engine, that uses its training data to mimic human conversations, and find the next word that is MOST likely to follow given patterns in the conversations it’s seen.

BECAUSE of this it’s said: that despite how much WORK people do on their own to make these things SEEM more human than they are…they are NOT human. They don’t REALLY create ANYTHING…they just rearrange things that have already been SAID by humans before…in a way that APPEARS novel to the people that have never read the ideas before.

But real storytelling for Han, the WAY that we’ve LIVED THROUGH stories throughout our collective history…real storytelling involves RISK. It involves having an imagination, and thinking of new ways of living that haven’t been conceived of yet. MORE than that it requires a deeper connection with the world at an existential level in the FIRST place…than just processing data could ever GIVE to an AI.

Han predicts the more an individual or society RELIES on AI…the LESS imagination they will have. It’ll become HARDER for them to arrive at TRULY new ways of thinking or living, or in other words: it’ll be harder for them to write new stories.

Anyway, you’ll notice ALL of these examples Han gives throughout the book have a theme.

We’re caught in a tech fueled momentum… that invites millions of people to reduce a potentially DEEP connection they may have with the world…to data. Or information processing.

And Han, FAR from being someone that wants to offer a prescription to people to solve it, he’s not hocking a seminar that people need to come to…no, he just thinks we don’t NEED to be LIVING…in a constant state of disenchantment about the world we live in.

There are ways to create DISTANCE in your life…FROM these things that are HOSTILE to you having a narrative connection with things. And again while he’d never say he knows how to FIX this…maybe ONE thing near the top of his list that he’d recommend is to make space in your life… for a little more BOREDOM.

Walter Benjamin once said that storytelling happens in the warm grey fabric of BOREDOM.

And what he MEANS is: you have to be BORED sometimes and have a little of that constructive negativity that Han talks about… if you EVER want to.slow down enough to let your experience settle, into a place where information can be integrated into a story.

Because without that SPACE…without being able to reflect on what something truly means, or to connect a moment to something larger than just right now: STORIES, will never be able to form, MEMORIES can’t form, you never SLOW down LONG enough…to know even where you are. A little bit of boredom…is an invitation to explore who you truly are.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know if you want, or strongly DON’T want more Byung Chul Han…there’s a couple more books we could do that are very important to understanding his full project.

If you value the show as an educational resource and wanna help keep it available for everyone: Patreon.com/philosophizethis As always: thank you for listening…talk to you next time.