The depressive disorder of the contemporary achievement-subject does not follow upon a conflicted, ambivalent relation to the Other that now has gone missing. No dimension of alterity is involved. Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.

Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society 42

Melancholy people . . . live within a skewed time sense. It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal. Massive, weighty, doubtless traumatic because laden with too much sorrow or too much joy, a moment blocks the horizon of depressive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective. . . . No revolution is possible, there is no future . . . An overinflated, hyperbolic past fills all the dimensions of psychic continuity. . . . A dweller in truncated time, the depressed person is necessarily a dweller in the imaginary realm.

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun 60-61