From a distance, it looks as though people are praying.

Their heads are bowed solemnly, their hands folded before them. But then I notice the phone. They are not praying—just looking at their screens.

Since the arrival of the smartphone, rates of mental illness have risen sharply: depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide, especially among the young. As Jonathan Haidt documents in The Anxious Generation, something fundamental has shifted in the psychic architecture of modern life. Our attention has been captured, our inner lives fragmented, and our sense of self quietly distorted.

This is where the philosopher Byung-Chul Han becomes indispensable. “The narcissistic-depressive subject hears only the echo of itself,” Han writes in his book In the Swarm. “Social media such as Twitter and Facebook intensify this development. They are narcissistic media.”

We live in a narcissistic age. And like Narcissus himself, many drown. Some burn out; others fall into depression. According to Han, depression is “a narcissistic illness.” Byung-Chul Han was born in South Korea in 1959 but moved to Germany as a young man to study metallurgy. This choice, however, was a smoke screen—an excuse to leave home. In reality, he abandoned metallurgy and began an entirely different path: philosophy. At the time, he could neither speak nor read German. Nevertheless, today he is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

Han achieved his commercial breakthrough in 2010 with The Burnout Society. As the title suggests,........

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