Contemplation: Healing the Compulsion to Activity

Christmas and Epiphanytide are special liturgical seasons during which Christians worldwide set aside sacred time and space to reflect and give thanks for the many blessings God has bestowed upon us including the best blessing of all: the Birth of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But far too often, even Christians are besought by the constant commercial distractions aggressively manifesting themselves this time of year. Taken hostage, our attention is forced to focus on the material things we received at Christmas by man rather than the spiritual gifts that were given to us and paid for with such a great price by God.

This past fall, I took a class at St. Bernard’s called Contemplation and the Other Shapes of Happiness. Taught by Dr. Marco Stango, my classmates and I studied the philosophy of contemplation from the perspectives of Plato, Aristotle, Richard of St. Victor, and a more contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. During our conversations in class, and based on the conversations I had with family, friends, and coworkers about Han’s work in particular, I truly believe that one of the gifts God wishes to give us this year is the gift of healing, especially healing from the compulsion to activity.

In this digital age—and even at the most sacred times of year—daily life is supersaturated with opportunities to exploit ourselves for profit. [1] What was once enjoying a conversation is now podcasting, once playing, now a chance to go viral on social media. The spirit of leisure that once animated these ordinary moments of life has been robbed by the prospect of making a buck or two. Paradoxically, people have become repressed by the endless opportunity to express themselves, and life itself becomes commercialized. This phenomenon is what Han calls a compulsion—a compulsion to activity, to production, to “competitive performance.”[2] These compulsions permeate our culture, enslaving humanity by rendering even rest and inactivity helpless to activity’s regime, making everything ‘work’ only within the very framework of work itself. [3]

The most pressing danger of this way of life is that it leaves our very being vulnerable to complete burnout. [4] Walter Benjamin, who Han was heavily influenced by, may have called our current culture the pathway to the mechanical production of the self. Because the self becomes monetized (or at least monetizable), its constant activity, in the end, detaches the self from itself, removing “its presence in time and space [and] its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” [5] This moves one’s very being out of the realm of leisure and into a realm contrary to its nature—the realm of activity. Human beings, then, become society’s primary means of production, optimized resources—“machines that must simply function.” [6] Not only that, but people are trapped in a vicious cycle, themselves becoming the very products they produce.

Thankfully, inactivity—or contemplation—can resist this neoliberal overtaking and heal the wounds of our compulsions. Not opposed to activity, [7] inactivity imbues activity with a particular character marked by a “holy, festive calmness,” [8] by postures of listening, [9] waiting, [10] receiving, [11] and renouncing. [12] In activity, actions are done to achieve goals extrinsic to themselves and, therefore, divides reality. In inactivity, actions are purposeless, or done for the purposes intrinsic to the activity itself, a uniting force. Engaged with inactively, enjoying a conversation and playing retain their essence of leisure. In inactivity, the true nature of activities shine forth without hidden agendas directing them to something other than themselves. Activity, then, becomes a dignified affirmation of itself and of the self, for “only in inactivity do we become aware of the ground on which we rest, and of the space in which we are.”

Life lived in the contemplative mode is the remedy because it is “where a human being always already is.” If given the opportunity, it will reclaim its rightful place organizing life and culture around freedom and leisure. Instead of blindly acting and reacting to stimuli, people will be free to respond. Life will become a festival, and the soul will be free to truly live. As we enter more deeply into the liturgical season after Epiphany, it will be my prayer for all of us that Our Lord and Our Lady will grant us the capacity to live life this way, so that they may heal our compulsions and help us become the people we are meant to be—the people we always already are.

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[1] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 1.
[2] Byung-Chul Han,The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015).
[3] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 2.
[4] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015).
[5] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Penguin UK, 2008).
[6] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 3.
[7] Ibid., p. 17.
[8] Ibid., p. 2.
[9] Ibid., p. 10.
[10] Ibid., p. 11.
[11] Ibid., p. 38.
[12] Ibid., p. 39