Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? — The New Atlantis

Review

Summer 2026

Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad?

From “The Burnout Society” to “The Tonality of Thought,” tech philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s ultra-short books reveal why online liberation has felt more like voluntary captivity.

Matt Elmore

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Byung-Chul Han is one of Europe’s most widely read philosophers. His audience in the United States has grown considerably over the last decade, though mostly outside the academy; in 2024, the New Yorker dubbed him “The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher” — an ironic label for a thinker who keeps his distance from the online world. His latest book, The Tonality of Thought, gathers three public lectures that serve as windows into his work and way of life. In its own way, the book makes sense of why his writing has struck a chord in the digital age.

Reviewed in this article

The Tonality of Thought

Byung-Chul Han

Polity ~ 2026 ~ 144 pp.<br>$59.95 (hardcover)<br>$16.95 (paperback)

Han grew up in South Korea and now lives in Berlin. Most mornings, he begins his day not with his phone, not with email or headlines, but with Bach. A Steinway grand piano sits in his apartment, where he plays the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations — a spare, unhurried theme that opens and closes a set of thirty short pieces. He calls the piano his prayer wheel, like those found in temple courtyards across Asia. At the piano, he says, he does not so much think as let thinking take place. “For me, thinking is thanking.” When he plays, thoughts arrive like visitors, and he answers them with a quiet grazie.

A few steps from the piano stands an art nouveau writing desk. Every day he walks back and forth between the piano and his desk — twenty times, by his count — returning to Bach when he has no words. Han is a philosopher, though not the kind the last century prized. He builds no system, offers no program, stages no revolution. Nor does he stop at the unmasking of power. His books are unsparing in their critique of digital capitalism, but they do not end in critique; they rest on a deeper sense of beauty, friendship, and transcendence — themes as old as philosophy itself.

For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age?

Byung-Chul Han<br>Album / Archivo ABC / Inés Baucells / Alamy

His best-known answer came in 2010 with The Burnout Society. At just over fifty pages, the book found readers well beyond Germany, in part because it named a condition many had felt but could not quite define, and in part because its diagnosis proved difficult to ignore. It made a simple yet bracing claim: in Western societies, the dominant form of power has shifted. No king commands us. No foreman stands watch. For many who work on screens rather than factory floors, there is no whistle, no visible overseer. The disciplinary institutions Foucault described — those that monitored, corrected, and confined behavior — still exist, yet they are less dominant in shaping how we live. A different logic has risen to govern our habits, and instead of repressing, it affirms. Instead of commanding, it motivates. Instead of saying no, it says yes — relentlessly.

If the old regime spoke in the voice of prohibition, the new one speaks in likes. Its pressure feels less like a frowning teacher and more like a game of comparison — with influencers, metrics, and a curated self that always seems one step ahead. We are told to optimize our sleep, perfect our diets, build our brands, unlock our potential. Listen long enough and you’ll learn how to biohack your mornings, discipline your focus, and transform your passions into revenue. Scroll long enough and you’ll be reminded that Beyoncé has the same 24 hours you do.

Stanford Briefs

Power no longer feels like oppression. It feels like opportunity, a pressure that builds from within, overwhelming our sense of choice with a compulsion to perform. We become both manager and managed — both master and slave, as Han puts it — driving ourselves harder than an overseer would. We are not coerced, and there is no tyrant to resist. When we fall short, we only fall back into the grip of our own self-judgment. The feeling is not guilt, as with a broken rule, but humiliation. Unable to stomach failure, we follow the script of self-improvement, learning only to push ourselves until something gives way.

Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that...