You know the feeling. You sit down and within two minutes you need to stand up and go somewhere. You turn on Netflix and halfway through the first episode you feel guilty — not because the show is bad, but because you could be learning something, building something, doing something that counts. You go to the sauna to relax and find yourself planning a side project. You are on holiday and you are already calculating how to be more productive when you get back.
It is not ambition. Ambition has a target. This has no target — it is just a permanent background hum that says: whatever you are doing, it is not enough. Whatever you are, you are not enough yet. It does not turn off at weekends. It follows you into the room where you drink your first coffee, before the day has asked anything of you. Already reaching. Already behind.
I have it. And I am lucky — I notice it. Most people just run it automatically, the way you run an app in the background without knowing it is draining the battery. It has spread so quietly through our generation that we stopped treating it as a condition and started treating it as a personality. We gave it a flattering name: drive. The people who have it most severely are the ones most likely to be promoted for having it. Nobody told us there was another name for it — and that the other name was closer to a diagnosis.
Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-German philosopher who published a book in 2010 called The Burnout Society. It is short — barely a hundred pages — and it is one of the more uncomfortable things I have read in recent years. Not because it is difficult. Because it is accurate.
His argument is this. The old society was a disciplinary society — it oppressed through prohibition, through external commands, through the word no. You were told what you could not do, and the system enforced it. That society produced rebels. People who pushed back.
The new society is an achievement society. It does not say no. It says yes. Yes, you can. Yes, you should. Yes, you are capable of more. The oppression is no longer external — it is internal. You are both the prisoner and the guard. And the prisoner who guards himself is harder to liberate than any prisoner who can point to a captor.
The person Han is describing is not lazy. They are not failing. They are working very hard — on themselves, on their projects, on their performance. And they are burning out, quietly, not from too many demands placed on them by others, but from demands they cannot stop placing on themselves. The exhaustion is not from the mountain. It is from the climber who cannot stop climbing even when the mountain ends.
I read that and I sat with it for a while. Because the hum I described at the beginning — the one I called drive — fits that description precisely.
I spent a year in the Netherlands as part of a startup programme. I expected certain things from the Dutch. Efficiency, yes. Directness, certainly. What I did not expect was the complete absence of guilt around doing nothing.
I expected this concept to come from Greece, maybe. Or Italy. The Spanish, the Italians, the Greeks — these are the cultures you associate with the long lunch, the afternoon pause, the civilised refusal to let work consume the whole day. But it came from the Dutch. They have a word: niksen. It translates, very roughly, as doing nothing with no purpose. Not meditation, which has a goal. Not rest, which implies recovery from effort. Just — nothing. Sitting. Looking out of the window. Being present with no agenda.
I did not learn this while I was there. I learned it years later, from a 2019 New York Times article titled — and I am not making this up — “The Case for Doing Nothing.” The writer introduced the Dutch concept of niksen and, apparently, was immediately met with a wave of criticism and corrections from Dutch readers. Which is very Dutch. You write an article about the art of doing nothing, and the Dutch cannot help themselves — they must respond, precisely and at length, to tell you everything you got wrong about it. The irony appears lost on no one except perhaps the Dutch.
What surprised me was the timing. I had spent a year surrounded by this culture and completely missed it. I was in startup mode the entire time — optimising, building, pushing. At lunch, Dutch colleagues would eat at their desks, not because they were overwhelmed, but because lunch was simply not a performance for them. I noticed it and judged it as unsociable. I did not see it for what it was. The concept was right in front of me the whole time. I just did not have a word for it yet — and without a word, you cannot see the thing.
Russell wrote that in 1932. The achievement society Han describes was still forming then. Now it runs at full speed, and it has a content creator on every platform telling you that successful people wake at 5am, that rest is for the weak, that if you are not building you are falling behind. The message is not imposed. It is chosen. Scrolled into, voluntarily, by people who are not even unhappy — just unable to stop.
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is the same — once you have the word, you start seeing the thing everywhere. Though I will admit: even now, after reading about it properly, I still occasionally say waba-sabi. Which, I am told, is not a concept. It is just a mistake.
Wabi-sabi is harder to pin down than niksen. It is not a practice. It is closer to a way of seeing. The word combines wabi — the beauty found in simplicity, in the asymmetrical, in the deliberately unfinished — and sabi — the beauty that comes from the passage of time, from things worn, faded, impermanent. A cracked tea bowl repaired with gold. A garden where the moss is the point, not an error. A sentence that does not resolve cleanly.
The Western aesthetic tends to run in the opposite direction. Completion, polish, resolution, the finished product. There is a reason we say finished as a compliment. Wabi-sabi treats the crack as part of the object. The incompleteness as part of the beauty. The impermanence not as a problem to solve but as the actual nature of things.
You can see it in the kintsugi bowl — the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. The crack is not hidden. It is highlighted. The repair becomes the most visible part of the object, and the object becomes more interesting, more individual, more itself because of what happened to it. A perfect bowl has no story. The broken and repaired one does. In the West we would throw it away and order a new one. In the wabi-sabi tradition, the break is where the history lives.
What strikes me about this is not the aesthetics. It is the relationship to completion. The achievement subject — Han’s term for the person I described in myself — is in a permanent war with incompleteness. The project is never quite done. The career is never quite where it should be. The version of yourself you are building is always one iteration behind the one you need to become. Wabi-sabi is not the answer to that. But it points at something the achievement drive refuses to look at: that incompleteness is not a temporary condition to be eliminated. It is the permanent condition of everything that is alive.
The crack in the bowl is not a flaw waiting to be fixed. It is part of the bowl’s history. It is what happened to it. And what happened to it is what it is.
The hum is still there most mornings. I notice it now — that is the difference. You cannot change what you do not name, and for a long time I did not have a name for it. Once I did, it stopped running me automatically.
Practically: if you schedule everything, schedule your niksen. Fifteen minutes, no phone, no podcast, no output. Look out of the window. Walk without tracking anything. Cook something just to cook it. The difference from mindfulness is that you are not managing your thoughts — you are leaving them alone. The trap is turning it into another achievement. The moment you are doing niksen to become more productive, you have missed the point entirely.
I used to wonder about the old men in Italy, Greece, Turkey — the ones who sit outside all day at the same table, same coffee, same street. I thought it was poverty of ambition. I now think they knew something the rest of us are paying wellness coaches to rediscover. They did not need a Dutch word for it. We needed a Dutch word, a Korean-German philosopher, and a New York Times trend piece to arrive at the same place. The old men are probably still out there. Still not reading articles about it.
On perfectionism: it is not a standard. It is the hum in a suit. One more revision, one more iteration, one more version of yourself — that loop does not end, because it was never designed to end. Wabi-sabi is the exit. The crack is part of the object. The career still in progress is not a draft waiting for a final edit. It is already the thing. Ship it.
But before you try any of this — ask yourself something honestly. What happens if you stop? Not slow down. Stop. No schedule, no goals, no system. What is actually underneath? If you are too afraid to answer that, at least ask where it started. Who taught you that stopping was dangerous? When did the hum begin?
And while you are being honest: how many of you are getting psychological help, or taking supplements, or trying every productivity system on the market — and none of it is really working? Because maybe the issue is not the system. Maybe the issue is that you have not yet asked what you are actually running from.
If you have the guts to try something completely different — try niksen. Try wabi-sabi. Not as a technique. As a genuine question about how you are living. Otherwise you just spent five minutes reading this and went straight back to the list. Maybe it is time to wake up.
