For a while I was obsessed with the Pomodoro Technique. Twenty-five minutes of work, five minutes of rest, then a longer break after four rounds. I installed an app on my phone, set the timer, and recorded each day how many pomodoros I completed.

My record was 16 pomodoros in a single day. I screenshotted it and posted it to my story, captioned: “Productivity off the charts today.”

Looking back now, that screenshot is the most absurd part of the whole thing. I wasn’t just monitoring my own efficiency—I was displaying the results of that monitoring. I was simultaneously the worker, the overseer, and the PR department.

Byung-Chul Han would say: this is a textbook symptom of the achievement society.

From Discipline to Self-Exploitation

In The Burnout Society, Han makes a very precise distinction.

The “disciplinary society” that Foucault described—prisons, factories, schools, controlling people through external discipline and surveillance—is no longer the dominant operating mode of our era. It has been replaced by the “achievement society.”

In the achievement society, the oppressor is not outside, but inside.

No one holds a whip forcing you to work overtime; it’s you who feel you’ll fall behind if you don’t. Replying to messages on weekends, too—it’s you who fear missing an opportunity. Personal branding? No one demands it either—it’s just that you yourself believe that not maintaining one is equivalent to not existing.

Han uses a term I find remarkably apt: the violence of positivity. Unlike traditional violence, this kind has no clearly identifiable perpetrator. It is inflicted by the self upon the self, and it disguises itself as “ambition” and “self-actualization.”

You’re not being oppressed; you’re “pursuing your dreams.” You’re not being exploited; you’re “investing in yourself.” Say you’ve burned out? That’s called “giving it your all.”

The linguistic packaging is so perfect that you don’t even realize you’re suffering.

The Shackles of Being Seen

Social media has pushed this problem to its extreme.

Han points out that the subject of the achievement society constantly displays itself, seeking to be seen and affirmed. This display is not incidental but structural—the platforms are designed to make you continuously produce, continuously expose yourself, and be continuously evaluated.

Having managed social media content myself, I feel this deeply. You write an article, and the first thing after publishing isn’t to think “Did I express my idea clearly?” but rather “Will this get good reach?” When reach becomes the metric of value, your attention shifts from “what I want to say” to “what will be seen.”

Then even rest becomes performance. If you share a photo on social media of “relaxing today,” that photo too gets placed within the economy of visibility and measured. Relaxation must have quality, travel must have aesthetic appeal, even daydreaming must look philosophical. If your relaxation isn’t expressed with elegance and refinement on social media, it becomes laziness.

Within the cycle of “being seen, being liked, being followed,” we package ourselves as commodities, displayed under the gaze of others. We are at once performer, audience, and our own agent.

In “The Life You Envy Is Someone Else’s Miracle,” I discussed the trap of social comparison. But The Burnout Society showed me a deeper layer: the entire social structure has already made “being seen” the precondition of existence. If you’re not seen, you don’t exist.

Efficiency as a Tool of Self-Imprisonment

Back to the Pomodoro Technique.

Han would probably analyze my Pomodoro experience this way: you think you’re managing time, but in fact time is managing you. Each time the timer rings, it’s a command—commanding you to return to the track of efficiency. You’re not using a tool; you’re obeying a surveillance system you built yourself.

When I first read this analysis, I thought it was an overinterpretation. But later I noticed something: every time the Pomodoro timer rang, what did I do during the five minutes of rest? Scroll my phone, check notifications, reply to messages. My “rest” was no rest at all, just a switch from one form of attention-consumption to another.

The entire system—the Pomodoro timer, the to-do lists, the calendar, the various productivity apps—constitutes a sophisticated apparatus of self-imprisonment. And the most paradoxical part is that we walk into it voluntarily, and we even pay a monthly fee.

This isn’t just a problem at the individual level. In startup culture, “I work 14 hours a day” isn’t a complaint—it’s a medal of honor. “I haven’t taken a vacation in three years” isn’t a warning sign—it’s a commitment. “I’m still answering emails on the plane” isn’t pathological—it’s dedication.

Who’s demanding this of you? No one. You’re your own boss. But you’re also your own cruelest oppressor.

The Achievement Trap for Entrepreneurs

I must admit that, as an entrepreneur, I’m caught in the trap of the achievement society more deeply than most.

Because entrepreneurship itself is a structure that rationalizes self-exploitation to the extreme. You’re not working for someone else; you’re “realizing your own vision.” So overtime isn’t called overtime—it’s called “commitment.” Having no vacation isn’t called having no vacation—it’s called “a sense of mission.” Your body breaking down isn’t called a warning sign—it’s called “sacrificing for the cause.”

I remember a period when I went to bed at around 2 a.m. almost every night and got up at 6 a.m. Not because there was genuinely too much to finish, but because stopping made me anxious. Anxious about what? Anxious that “others are working harder than me while I sleep.”

Han precisely describes this state: the achievement-subject turns “can” into “must.” You can do more, therefore you must do more. The boundaries disappear. Not because someone removed them, but because you yourself treated the boundaries as a symbol of cowardice and dismantled them with your own hands.

Boredom as Remedy

The solution Han proposes sounds absurd: we need to relearn how to be bored.

In the achievement society, everyone is compelled to produce ceaselessly, to act ceaselessly, and to feel anxious the moment they stop. But Han believes boredom is an underrated capacity. It is the precondition for deep attention—thought needs to settle within boredom in order to produce genuine creativity.

I later had an experience that helped me understand what he was saying.

One weekend, I deliberately did nothing. No phone, no computer, no podcasts. The first two hours were excruciating, with a voice constantly surfacing in my head: “You’re wasting time.” But by the third hour, a strange quiet emerged. My thoughts began to wander freely, drifting toward things I hadn’t thought about in a long time; I watched the clouds moving outside the window and suddenly found their shapes fascinating.

That afternoon I produced nothing. But in the week that followed, I wrote the best article of the month.

Boredom is not the opposite of productivity. It is the groundwater of productivity—you can’t see it, but without it, the lushness on the surface will sooner or later wither.

Can’t Keep Grinding, Can’t Lie Flat

“Can’t keep grinding, can’t lie flat”—these six words precisely describe our generation’s predicament.

We can’t keep grinding, because we’ve already reached our physical and psychological limits. We can’t lie flat, because the internalization of the achievement society has penetrated to the bone, making even rest carry a sense of guilt.

Han’s answer is neither lying flat nor grinding harder. His answer is: to reclaim the capacity for contemplation.

This resonates with what I learned in faith. Within the Christian spiritual tradition there’s a concept called “Sabbath rest”—not doing nothing, but finding a conscious rhythm between doing and not-doing. You stop, not because you’re tired, but because stopping itself has value.

To feel the world anew in blankness and silence is a deeper form of participation. It requires courage—in an age when everyone is running, stopping is harder than accelerating.

Freedom is the ability to not act. In this age when everyone is running, this is the rarest capacity of all.