I always felt challenged by the first chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, especially his thought experiment about a world in which a natural disaster wipes out all scientific knowledge, leaving only fragments of it behind. This touched me because of its manifold resemblance with our contemporary situation. In such a world, those who attempt to revive the sciences are left with isolated pieces of knowledge, devoid of context, making their attempts ultimately futile (MacIntyre 1984, 1-5). He argues that this scenario is analogous to the collapse of moral language in contemporary society, where we no longer recognize the disorder and emptiness of moral concepts, because their origins and contexts have been forgotten. For me this idea raises a crucial question: What if something similar has happened to our ability to celebrate?
In recent decades, if not centuries, celebrations have multiplied in almost every area of life – national, religious, community, and family holidays are pervasive. They fill our calendars to such an extent that it can sometimes feel as if the ordinary, non-holiday moments are the exceptions. However, as we approach these holidays, many of us stand in confusion, unsure of their true meaning or role in our lives. Have we lost the ability to truly understand and experience celebration to its depth? In this forum essay, I will explore this issue through the philosophical lens of Byung-Chul Han, particularly focusing on his works The Burnout Society(Han, 2015) and The Disappearance of Rituals (Han, 2020). My questions to Han’s writings are simple: How did we lose the ability to celebrate and how can we recover it?
Patterns of Celebration in the Modern World
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent energy crisis have shown the fragility and the fluidity of boundaries between the private and public spheres. As digital technologies have blurred these boundaries, the way we organize time and space for work and leisure has shifted dramatically. No longer confined to traditional office hours or set physical spaces, work and leisure have become increasingly fluid, leading to a loss of traditional markers that once defined the boundaries between day and night, work and rest, or school and personal life (Kovács, 2023; Csizmady and Kőszeghy 2023). Even the structure of holidays has been disrupted, with digital connectivity making holidays seem more like events – occurrences that are often fleeting and disconnected, rather than deep, ritualistic experiences that engage us in a timeless fashion beyond the schedule of work and leisure.
The commercialization of holidays further intensifies this shift. Seasonal products appear on store shelves far in advance of the holidays they are associated with, and many goods related to these holidays are available year-round, blurring the temporal specificity of what once were unique seasonal traditions (Miller, 2017). In this context, the traditional spatial and temporal coordinates of holidays have been displaced. Celebrations are no longer anchored to specific places or times but are increasingly shaped by the logistics of consumption and personal choice. The flexibility of work hours and the freedom to shop and socialize digitally create new pressures to perform and participate in celebrations according to individual preferences rather than communal traditions. This has led to an environment where celebrations, instead of being collective and sacred moments, are fragmented and individualized.
Byung-Chul Han’s Diagnosis of Contemporary Society
Byung-Chul Han offers a diagnosis of contemporary society that helps illuminate the crisis of celebration. In The Burnout Society, he argues that the primary issue of the 21st century is not the spread of external threats such as infectious diseases, but rather the overwhelming pressure of positivity, i.e. our relentless drive for productivity, achievement, and self-optimization. The traditional forms of social control, rooted in negativity (e.g., punishment, discipline), have been replaced by a society that operates through “projects, initiatives, and motivation”. (Han 2015, 9).
In this society, individuals are not coerced by external authorities but are instead self-exploitative, constantly striving to achieve more and to perform better. This results in what Han describes as the “depressive individual”, a person who is overwhelmed by the pressure to perform, resulting in burnout, anxiety, and an inability to find fulfillment in everyday life (Han 2015, 11). As he puts it, the modern individual is both the subject and object of exploitation: “The depressive person is the animal laborans, who exploits himself, doing so willingly, without external coercion” (Han 2015, 10).
Han provides a framework for understanding why celebration, as a genuine experience, has become increasingly rare. In a world that prioritizes continuous productivity, there is no space for the kinds of rituals or silences that celebration requires. The overwhelming positivity that drives us to work harder and perform more leaves little room for the kind of emptiness that celebration depends on – a time that is free from goals, free from the drive to achieve, and free from productivity.
The Disappearance of Rituals
In The Disappearance of Rituals (Han 2020), Han extends his analysis to the role of rituals in contemporary society. Rituals – whether religious, familial, or social – are disappearing because they are seen as irrelevant in a world dominated by the logic of performance and efficiency. The very idea of ritual, which involves a break from the ordinary and a return to something timeless and sacred, has been undermined by the logic of optimization and individualism. Rituals once served to connect individuals to something beyond the self, to something transcendent or communal. However, today, the self has become the center of attention, and even social interactions are increasingly structured around individual desire and personal gain.
Celebration, in this context, is no longer something that brings people together in shared, transcendent experiences. Instead, it has become another form of performance – an event that individuals must opt into and organize according to their own desires and needs. As Han suggests, contemporary celebrations are often devoid of the sacred and the communal. They are reduced to events that serve the logic of consumerism, where the experience of celebration is mediated by consumption and individualized choice.
The Impact of Digitalization on Celebration
The rise of digital technology has further complicated the relationship between celebration and ritual. Digital spaces have created new forms of social interaction, but these often lack the depth and transcendence of traditional rituals. The ability to connect with others anytime and anywhere has transformed the experience of holidays, making them feel more like fleeting events rather than deeply rooted cultural and religious moments. Digital technology fosters a kind of shallow, dispersed attention that further erodes our ability to engage with the present moment in a meaningful way. Just as multitasking dilutes attention and prevents deep engagement with any single task, the constant connectivity of the digital world prevents us from immersing ourselves fully in the rituals of celebration (Han 2015, 13). The fragmentation of attention that characterizes the digital age is detrimental to the engagement that celebration requires.
The Possibility of Reclaiming Celebration
Han’s diagnosis of modernity leaves us with an important question: Is it still possible to celebrate in a meaningful way? Han would likely argue that the current conditions of overabundance and the pressure to perform make genuine celebration difficult, if not impossible. Yet, he also suggests that there is a way forward. In The Disappearance of Rituals (Han 2020), Han calls for a return to rituals, sacred times, and spaces that resist the logic of productivity (Han 2019, 95-111). These obsolete things are not simply outdated; they hold the potential to reconnect us with something deeper, something that has been lost in our pursuit of constant optimization.
What is outdated often poses an obstacle in life. But more frequently it serves as a crutch by keeping something invisible alive or by bringing back something forgotten. Just as there is no antibiotic for attention disorders or depression, there is no prescription for how celebration can reappear in our lives with depth. Similarly to the people described by MacIntyre, who are trying to regain science, we are often left with fractures of memories and the lack of the continuity of the original context. However the mosaics, together with rediscovered rituals and new concepts of time and space beyond the logic of production, may offer the possibility to bring us back to the original experience of celebration.
Bibliography
Csizmady Adrienne és Kőszeghy Lea. 2023. “A Covid–19-járvány hatása a lakáshasználati szokásokra és a lakásmobilitásra.” In A Covid-19 járvány társadalmi hatásai, edited by Bernadett Csurgó és Imre Kovách, 98-120. Budapest: Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804797504.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2019. A Kiégés társadalma. Budapest: Typotex.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2020. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Kovács Gusztáv. 2023. “COVID-19 and Family Schedule”. Family Forum 12 (January):185-91. https://doi.org/10.25167/FF/4963.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Miller, Daniel. 2017. “Christmas: An Anthropological Lens”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 409–42. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.027.
This article has been linguistically revised with the assistance of an AI language model, ChatGPT, for clarity and correctness.