Why isn’t a smooth life a rich one?

In his book Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher, reckons that contemporary culture just wants everything to be frictionless. By that he means we want everything to be pleasing and easy to consume, stripped of anything that might wind you up, disturb your flow or get in the way of life just being nice and easy. He calls this modern ideal the society of positivity, and the word he uses within that is smoothness. We want everything to be smooth and nice and easy.

His examples run from a smartphone screen, your nice polished phone with its screen protector on, to Brazilian waxing. We don’t even like hairiness any more. He thinks it’s all to do with an attempt to eliminate what he calls the negativity of injury. We’ve removed resistance. In Han’s words: “What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like.”

When he says Like, he means something like liking a post on social media: a quick, easy thing to do. You respond, click Like, painless. It’s affirmative, and you can carry on scrolling, carry on consuming whatever you’re consuming. Genuine encounters, Han thinks, make you stop. You might have to struggle with them a little and work out what’s going on before you can put your response into words.

He links this to beauty, hence the book’s title. You can’t reduce beauty to a quick tap of approval on a phone, a throwaway Like. Beauty, he says, involves vulnerability, fragility and injury, maybe a bit of darkness and concealment, even what he calls brokenness. So flawless presentation can never be beauty.

When we remove everything that’s uncomfortable, experience becomes what he calls autoerotic: a frictionless loop of narcissistic self-gratification, where you get rid of everything that might actually change you. Everything is tailor-made to please you and keep you happy, keep the flow going, keep you consuming, and confirm your existing ways of thinking, your existing perceptions and assumptions. Which means you never meet anything outside your own head. As Han puts it, “Without injury there is no truth, not even perception.” And: “Without injury, neither poetry nor art is possible.”

That doesn’t mean you should go off and try to suffer as much as possible. I’m the world’s biggest critic of ice bath culture, where everyone’s trying to suffer as if it’s some kind of noble thing. Han isn’t saying that. He just means be careful not to confuse a frictionless, smooth life with a rich one. From Han’s perspective, that isn’t a good life.

He wants us to recover a kind of beauty that has depth to it: one that can’t be fully polished or controlled, boxed off, kept safe and instantly consumed. As he says, “Consumption and beauty are mutually exclusive. Beauty does not promote itself.” Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation.

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.