Viva-La-Rechristmas!

It is strange how a story as familiar as A Christmas Carol still feels slightly uncanny every time you read it. Maybe that is because beneath the carol-singing and the sentimentality there is a deeper structure at work, something closer to a philosophical experiment about time, hope, and what it means to be a person in a world that demands we become something less than human. A story about the recovery of a life that has been flattened into mere productivity.

Dickens gives us Scrooge, someone we would probably recognise today as a kind of proto-productivity-bro on his grindset. Everything timed, optimised, and accounted for. From the 4:30am wake-up and ice face wash to the treadmill-walking lunch.

This is why Scrooge does not simply refuse Christmas because he dislikes singing or small talk. He refuses it because Christmas represents everything that cannot be made productive. It wastes time. It encourages feeling. It interrupts the endless churn of rationality and profit. His ledger replaces his heart because the ledger never asks him to be vulnerable. It never asks him to enter shared time with others. It never exposes him to the risk of loving someone he might lose. Calculation feels safe, while feeling doesn’t.

The contemporary philosopher Byung Chul Han helps us understand how a person like Scrooge comes into being. Han argues that modern life produces what he calls the “achievement subject”, someone who is constantly optimising, recording, calculating, and producing. This subject no longer needs an external boss because they have internalised the logic of compulsion, continually pressuring themselves to work harder, improve faster, and be more efficient. The result is not freedom but exhaustion. A subject who is depressed yet still blames themselves for not doing enough. Joy becomes suspicious. Rest becomes guilt. Ritual and festivity dissolve because they cannot justify themselves in terms of productivity or output. Even our inner life becomes a feedback loop of self-control.

Scrooge is an early prototype of Han’s achievement subject. He is not ruled by cruelty so much as by numbness.

Han also writes about the disappearance of ritual. Shared festivities create a time that is not oriented around results. They bind people together in a rhythm that cannot be reduced to performance metrics. Christmas, in Dickens, becomes a type of resistance. A yearly refusal of the mechanised subject. A moment where the qualitative returns and people remember that they are not just units of production.

In that light, Scrooge’s refusal of Christmas is a refusal of life itself, because life, at its core, is always inconvenient. It involves interruptions. It involves giving without justification. It involves a kind of generosity that cannot be reconciled with the logic of gain. Scrooge has carefully insulated himself from anything that might expose him to the demands of others or remind him that he is finite. The cold he carries around is not simple cruelty. It is a kind of anaesthetic. Numbness is safer than feeling because feeling entails the possibility of pain.

This is why the spirits function not as judges but as temporal disrupters. The Ghost of Christmas Past drags Scrooge back into feelings he has suppressed. The Ghost of Christmas Present immerses him in scenes of joy he refuses to see. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the horizonless wasteland of a life lived without relation. These are not punishments. They are attempts to fracture the linear, productive time that has colonised him. They reintroduce him to a world that cannot be measured.

This is where the work of Ernst Bloch helps us see that Scrooge’s conversion is not a moralistic awakening. It is a shift in temporal consciousness. For Bloch, hope is not optimism or passive wishing. It is an active, forward-leaning consciousness that senses unrealised possibilities already present in the world. Hope reaches into the “not yet”, not as fantasy, but as a practical orientation toward what could still become real.

The ghosts in A Christmas Carol are not there simply to teach Scrooge a lesson about kindness. They are opening him to possibility and imagination. They show him, first, that his own past contained other paths he did not take. They show him, second, that his present is already full of concrete utopian moments. Fezziwig’s party. Fred’s laughter. The Cratchits’ stubborn joy.

These are not sentimental decorations around the “real” story. They are small, historically plausible examples of alternative social relations inside capitalist London. Warmth and solidarity do not belong to a mythical elsewhere. They already exist within the world Scrooge inhabits, which means his current way of living was never inevitable.

From this view, Scrooge stops treating the present as a closed system and begins to inhabit it as something open, unfinished, and full of risk. His future ceases to be a fixed endpoint where everything has already been determined. Instead, it becomes a field of action. This is why the final chapters feel so vivid. When he wakes up laughing at the cold air and shouting out the window, he is no longer the man who measured everything in ledgers. He has discovered that life is not a problem to be secured but a horizon you have to walk toward. And you cannot walk toward a horizon without a willingness to be changed by what you encounter.

And at this point you might think, “Sure, this story is sweet and all, but we don’t live in Victorian times, brother. We live under algorithms, tech billionaires, climate collapse, and endless notifications, just to name a few things. Who cares about some guy called Scrooge embracing Dickensian flower power?”

And yet, in many respects, we are more Scrooge-like than Scrooge himself. We have more comfort, more stuff, more flexibility, and still feel perpetually pressed for time, suspicious of anything that does not feed back into the project of ourselves. Which is precisely why this story continues to resonate. Han’s analysis tells us why. Bloch reminds us it does not have to stay that way. And Dickens whispers a very simple question: what if we stopped treating life as a ledger and started treating it as an encounter with the not yet?