Byung Chul Han is perhaps the most relevant philosopher on the contemporary scene. Listening to his words today is an act of courage. It's a way to look critically at ourselves and realize how much of what inhabits our psyche is shaped and installed by the system—to use Parsons's words—we live in.

Who is Byung Chul Han?

Han, a South Korean philosopher trained in Berlin, is a leading critic of today's society, its neoliberalism and individualism. Since the rise of statesmen like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the world has seen a return to the free market, mass privatization, and above all, a marked and relentless emphasis on personal responsibility . This is precisely where Han focuses his sociological study: we live in a world that isolates us through hyperinformation, that drains us, that plants within us the seed of neoliberalism: self-improvement, or continuous investment in ourselves in order to achieve the highest level of productivity society demands. We thus seek to overcome all our limitations, human and personal, thus reaching exhaustion, what Han calls "fatigue."

Contemporary consumerism

I couldn't help but dwell on how the culture of self-improvement is frighteningly tied to consumerism. We're all now acutely aware that we live in a disposable, à la carte world, where every good and service is immediately available. This drives us to desire, purchase, and consume every moment of our lives. However, how we purchase must be important, as nowadays it obscures the observation of what.

The role of influencers

It's crucial to start from a premise: to quote Gabriella Tupini (a psychologist highly regarded online), our minds are conditioned. It's easy to deduce that our consumer choices are too. How? The answer is quite simple. The foundation of today's marketing rests on social media, making influencers the biggest and most powerful sellers on the market. However, few people consider the meaning of "influencer ," which is more crucial than ever in this analysis. "Influencer" means "influencer," someone capable of influencing and moving the masses, as Le Bon already studied. Influencers effectively promote products through advertising contracts with various international and domestic companies. All of this might seem like banal advertising logic, but in reality it borders on one of the most subtle forms of psycho-economic manipulation. What is often overlooked, however, is, as I mentioned previously, the "how."

How to shop in contemporary consumerism

Influencers don't sell products, they sell lifestyles. The same lifestyles that neoliberalism has implanted in our "Kantian" categories: perfection, productivity, inhumanity. We, passive consumers of such content, can only dream of achieving this level of social integration. Being beautiful, perfect, and high-performing is beyond any human standard, but for Han, our society wants to transcend these biological boundaries. And so, in the hope of becoming an integral part of neoliberal society, we purchase the products that influencers promote, even hoping to become web stars themselves , to be able (as they make us believe) to transcend every psycho-socio-biological boundary, thus becoming perfect cogs in the modern capitalist production system.

We then end up devouring products we don't need, that don't belong to us, yearning for inhuman productivity and suffering. Suffering because what is asked of us goes beyond the ancient and contemporary confines of the human animal. How can we continue to be victims of a system that shuts us down, confines us, and devours us? Be free of it.

Augustine Lombardi

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