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Debate

Acceleration, Resonance and the Good Life

Wealth and technology have grown enormously, and in countries such as the United States people have more free time than in the 1960s, not less. Why, then, do so many feel rushed and exhausted – and what would a good life look like instead?

Smartphones, constant availability and the pressure to optimise oneself have made complaints about stress, burnout and lack of time part of everyday life in wealthy societies. Contemporary critical theory, especially in Germany, asks whether these are private problems or symptoms of how modern societies work. Its answers, and those of the sociology of emotions, revive old questions about what makes a life go well – questions that liberal philosophers such as Rawls preferred to leave to individuals, so that the state remains neutral between competing ideas of the good. Critics also ask whether diagnoses such as “burnout society” rest on evidence or on nostalgia for a slower past; their defenders reply that social philosophy must interpret experience, not only measure it.

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Positions

Acceleration and resonance

Rosa argues that modern societies can only stabilise themselves through constant growth, acceleration and innovation – of technology, of social change and of the pace of life. As a result we gain ever more options while the world falls silent for us. Against this he sets “resonance”: a relationship in which the world speaks to us and we answer, which cannot be produced at will – and which our drive to make the world controllable tends to destroy.

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The burnout society

Han argues that the disciplinary society of prohibitions has given way to an “achievement society” in which people exploit themselves while believing they are free. Its typical illnesses are not the effects of repression but of excess positivity: exhaustion, depression and burnout. Against constant activity and transparency he defends contemplation, idleness and the capacity to linger.

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Alienation and forms of life

Jaeggi reconstructs the concept of alienation without assuming a fixed human nature to which we should return: alienation is a “relation of relationlessness”, a disturbed way of appropriating one’s own life, actions and world. She also argues that forms of life – ways of organising work, family or markets – can be criticised rationally, as more or less successful solutions to the problems they face, rather than being a private matter of taste.

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Recognition

Honneth argues that people can only develop a secure relation to themselves through recognition in three forms: love in close relationships, equal rights in law, and esteem for their contribution to society. Many social conflicts are struggles for recognition, and experiences of disrespect – humiliation, exclusion, the devaluation of one’s work – damage people’s capacity to lead a good life. Social criticism, on this view, starts from such experiences of injustice.

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Authenticity and its horizons

Taylor argues that the modern ideal of authenticity – being true to oneself – is a genuine moral achievement, not mere self-indulgence. But it only makes sense against “horizons of significance” that we do not choose, such as community, nature, history or the transcendent. A life that treats everything as a matter of preference loses the very sources from which meaning comes.

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Emotions at work and at home

Sociologists of emotion look at where the exhaustion comes from. Illouz argues that capitalism and the emotions have shaped each other: therapeutic language – of self-realisation, emotional competence and working on oneself – has become the common sense of workplaces and private life (Saving the Modern Soul, 2008), and with Edgar Cabanas she criticises a happiness industry that turns well-being into a personal duty (Happycracy, 2019). Hochschild’s study of an American company (The Time Bind, 1997) found that many parents worked long hours partly because work had become more orderly and rewarding than home, which had taken on the time pressure of a workplace.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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