Many ages ago, there was Sisyphus, a cunning king who made the mistake of challenging the gods. His punishment was simple but torturous: The gods condemned him to push a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he reached the top. As his punishment was for eternity, he had to repeat this process daily.
Sisyphus, therefore, found himself trapped in an empty, meaningless life of toil. As modern-day Sisyphuses, aren’t we condemned to a similar fate? Aren’t we stuck in a relentless grind as we find our lives reduced to endless tasks?
Could it be that, as subjects of an achievement society, we’re losing something essential? Could it be that by constant productivity and the pursuit of achievement, we’ve forgotten to live? In his book, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains that, in our fast-paced world, we experience time in a fundamentally different way.
Time has become atomized, causing it to lack direction, coherence, and meaning. As we hop from one event to another, none of these events carry depth or significance. According to Han, we experience a temporal crisis, which causes us to feel restless, anxious, nervous, and frantic.
But, there’s hope for recovery, which Han also shares in his book. This video explores Han’s The Scent of Time, a dense work filled with profound insights. I’ve focused on unpacking its central ideas and capturing the essence of his essay.
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According to Han, today’s society demands people achieve, and failing to perform makes you a “loser. ” Achievement has become an ultimate concern—a virtue—leading us to constantly ‘whip’ ourselves into productivity. In his book, The Burnout Society, Han describes the workings of the achievement society and its destructive consequences, such as anxiety and burnout, which I’ve explored in a previous video about Han’s observations.
While the imperative to achieve primarily touches upon our working lives (such as chasing financial success or becoming startup entrepreneurs), the collective accomplishment-driven attitude also bleeds into the remainder of our lives, which we could classify as ‘leisure. ’ Even leisure has become some form of achievement. How we generally fill our free time has become a matter of checking boxes.
For example, when we travel, we try to cram as many activities as possible into our schedules, rushing from place to place, like warehouse workers rushing from shelf to shelf, picking orders. The general experience of traveling often lacks reflection, digestion, and simply being there. Experiencing it is more akin to window shopping.
Many people today are more interested in whether a particular place is “Instagrammable” than if there’s some profound, meaningful experience to find. Even watching a TV series has become a matter of quantity. In the past, certain shows created shared excitement—we’d talk about them beforehand, watch them together, and reminisce afterward.
The experience extended beyond the airing itself. Today, most entertainment is available on demand. There’s much less anticipation, excitement for what’s to come, and collective experience.
And because the entertainment options are so abundant, we tend to move on immediately to the next instead of adequately digesting and reflecting on what we just consumed. Nowadays, dating also shows a societal shift from quality to quantity: as marriage and commitment were the norm, serial monogamy (and even polyamory) has become more prevalent. We prefer more different experiences superficially and fleetingly over actual depth and meaning in relationships.
From today’s perspective, depth and length in relationships also come with monotony and boredom, things we look down upon nowadays and should be avoided. Why waste our time in the repetitiveness of long-term commitments if we can have exciting honeymoon phases characterized by novelty every couple of years with a new person? Today’s dominant mode of living is marked by relentless activity.
Han refers to it as vita activa (the active life), a term coined initially by Hannah Arendt to describe a life focused on labor, work, and action. Han criticizes the contemporary form of vita activa in the context of modern capitalism and the achievement society, as he observes that activity has become an end in itself. Being active or ‘in pursuit’ is what makes our lives count.
There’s no place for contemplation or reflection. There’s no place for what Han calls “duration” of time. Not producing or pursuing some kind of goal is seen as wasteful.
At the root of our current “age of haste” lies a fear of missing out. This fear leans on the idea that to make our lives more fulfilled and richer in experience, we must escalate the quantity of experience. In other words, the more experiences we can stuff into our lifespans, the better.
Of course, doing so requires an acceleration in savoring worldly experiences. We want to do more different things in a shorter period. However, according to Han, such a pursuit is counterproductive.
I quote: Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately also die faster. It is not the total number of events, but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about.
Fulfilment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be. End quote.
According to Han, our fast-paced lives give way to franticness, restlessness, nervousness, and anxiety. But more profoundly, as he describes in his book, our relationship with time has changed; time has lost its “scent. ” People often say, “Things were better in days gone by.
" But looking at the statistics regarding things like wealth, physical health, and overall safety, we could hardly make that case. Still, there’s something about the old days, something we’ve lost when life became more fast-paced, individualistic, and achievement-driven. According to Han, our “age of haste” is like a cinematographic succession of point-like presences without access to beauty or truth.
We want immediate enjoyment, and the default response to enjoyment fading is moving on to the next. As we pursue a larger quantity and variety of experiences in an attempt to enrich our lives, time also moves faster. Moreover, as Han explains, we experience time as temporal points, which he calls “atomized time.
” I quote: Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. End quote.
Atomized time fragments life into a directionless sequence of isolated moments, leaving no space for cohesion or meaningful conclusions. Without a narrative connecting past, present, and future, experiences remain shallow and fleeting. Han explains that time used to be more structured.
For example, in prehistoric times, time was cyclical, and we would adapt to these cycles, such as the seasons and lunar phases. Time had a rhythm, which granted us stability and predictability. Later, religion provided us with meaning through a greater narrative.
God gave us purpose and guidelines by which to live. Whatever we did, as religious people, everything fitted into a larger narrative. According to Han, actual, profound experience lies in vast temporal spaces.
Unlike point-time (or atomized time), these more significant periods consist of a dialectic between past and future, experienced in the present. These temporal spaces allow for a sense of continuity and depth. Religion, for instance, gives our lives a special purpose.
It creates an overarching narrative, a defined purpose, and a ‘why’ to everything we do. For example, an Abrahamic religion such as Islam provides a rhythm of rituals and celebrations. Take Ramadan, for example—a period of fasting from sunrise to sunset, during which Muslims experience shared meaning, and conclude with a celebration.
As a recurring holy month, Ramadan gives time rhythm. It takes people out of atomized time into a world of meaning. A day of fasting isn’t just an isolated point in time; it’s part of something bigger, combining past, present, and future.
Han stated: God functions like a stabilizer of time. He ensures a lasting, perennial present. End quote.
However, the regime has changed. For a significant part of the world, God lost His power. This hasn’t been without consequences, says Han, as God’s “death” (referring to Nietzsche) deprived time of any theological meaning, any doctrine of design and purpose.
In postmodernity, the present has shrunk to a fleeting point in time, atomized and disconnected from any meaningful past or future. I quote: Atomization and individualization take hold of societies as a whole. Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are all losing their importance.
End quote. What depth do our lives have if we jump from moment to moment? According to Han, atomized time doesn’t allow us to complete anything.
Take serial monogamy, for example, which characterizes itself not just by alternating relationships but also, from my own observations, by very small in-betweens and often no in-betweens at all. According to Han, a meaningful conclusion is necessary for proper experience. Experience isn’t just about the activity itself—it involves anticipation, reflection, and a narrative that connects it to something greater.
It’s a bit like Lao Tzu’s cup: the emptiness within and around it gives it purpose. Similarly, without the space around our actions—time to linger and reflect—this pointed, atomized time reduces life to isolated tasks, leaving no room for genuine experience, no room for completion or transition to the next. We prefer not to endure these intervals as we hop from one possibility to another.
After all, these transitional phases are a waste of time, obstructing us from more consumption and achievement. However, Han states that intervals—periods of not achieving and pursuing—serve a function. They provide us with direction and cohesion.
They bring order. For example, religious celebrations are intervals that provide us with structure, and so are rites of passage, as they close off one life’s chapter and transition to the next. Without these intervals, time becomes chaotic, a space without direction.
Things may have been better in the days gone by because our relationship with time was different. Events had more gravity and space around them. Time was slower.
As we anticipated and completed something and transitioned into the next, we experienced more depth. Commitments were sacred; friendships were longer and deeper. We could commit to a board game with family and friends for a whole evening, feeling genuine connection and fulfillment instead of checking hundreds of TikTok reels on our smartphones, which leaves us empty, restless, and unfulfilled.
As times have changed, and, for many, God as a “stabilizer of time” has become something of the past, and life’s pace is speeding up exponentially, what can we do to reclaim time? Han proposes a path to recovery: the art of lingering. In a world obsessed with productivity, where rushing and multitasking have become the new normal, and where anxiety, burnout, and depression have become prevalent, the idea of slowing sounds pretty rebellious.
As vita activa is our dominant mode of living, being less active is akin to blasphemy. But Han wrote quite early in the book that what’s necessary to overcome the temporal crisis is a revitalization of the “vita contemplativa” as a counterbalance to the vita activa. I quote: The temporal crisis will only be overcome once the vita activa, in the midst of its crisis, again incorporates the vita contemplativa.
End quote. According to Han, the return of the vita contemplativa will bring back ‘scent’ to time, as it liberates human beings from the compulsion of labor. But doing so requires a different look towards what we regard as ‘leisure.
’ Han observes that today’s leisure time is merely a break from work, as all energy is fully absorbed by work, so the only thing we do during leisure time is passive entertainment or recreation. Our free time is merely a matter of recuperating to enable us to work again with full strength. Therefore, leisure is part of work; it serves our primary purpose: labor.
It’s not contemplative rest, which Han regards as true leisure, disconnected from work. So, what’s vita contemplativa or the art of lingering? What does contemplation actually mean?
In his book, Han guides us through different views of contemplation and its proper place in our lives by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Aristotle. In my own words, the essence of Han’s vita contemplativa (which is deeply tied to our relationship with time) is this: instead of using time, linger in it. Leisure isn’t a mere break to recover from working; it is a space to endure, reflect, and simply be.
In the vita contemplativa, time becomes something to inhabit rather than use. For example, instead of actively directing our thoughts to achieve something, we allow them to arise naturally in moments of reflection. Traveling, for instance, transforms from a means of reaching a destination to experiencing the journey itself—wandering for the sake of wandering.
This contemplative space lets us think deeply about life, truth, and the cosmos: things far beyond the trivialities of daily life. It offers room to breathe, reflect, and transition meaningfully through rituals or solitude. It’s also where original ideas and profound insights emerge—possibilities that the restlessness of the vita activa does not allow.
“Contemplative lingering gives time,” writes Han, unlike the active life, which uses up and kills it. He states: “When life regains its capacity for contemplation, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness. ” Thank you for watching.
