The pace he set for himself

A few weeks ago I went running with someone I know only casually. Nothing serious, just an easy loop through the park, the kind of run I use to switch my brain off after a week spent chasing indicators of compromise and arguing about detection coverage. He had other plans. Within the first five minutes he was checking his watch, adjusting his stride to hit a target pace, and narrating his heart rate zones like a color commentator. By the end, he was visibly disappointed that he had not beaten his personal best from the previous week.

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I was not disappointed. I had gone running to stop thinking about work, and here was work following me anyway, just wearing different shoes. That contrast stuck with me longer than it should have. The running itself was beside the point. What had caught my attention was a mindset that has quietly colonized activities that used to exist outside the reach of metrics, deadlines, and self-improvement dashboards, and running was simply the version I happened to witness that particular Sunday.

In brief

  • A casual run with an acquaintance exposed how deeply a “performative” mindset has spread beyond work into hobbies, reading, and personal time.
  • Philosopher Byung-Chul Han theorized this shift explicitly in The Burnout Society, describing a move from external discipline to voluntary, internalized self-exploitation.
  • The same logic that drives dashboards, KPIs, and vanity metrics at the office now governs how people run, read, and even play music.
  • Constant quantification erodes the recovery value of rest itself, a problem SOC teams already live with, given that stress is a leading driver of analyst attrition.
  • Han’s later work, Vita Contemplativa, proposes reclaiming deliberately unproductive time as a form of resistance, not as failure.

A philosopher already named this

If you want a rigorous account of why this feels so pervasive, you do not need to invent a new theory. Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean-German philosopher, wrote the definitive diagnosis over a decade ago in Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (“The Burnout Society”). His argument is that we have moved from what Michel Foucault called the disciplinary society, built on external prohibitions and punishment, into what Han calls the achievement society, or performance society. In the disciplinary model, power tells you what you must not do. In the performance model, power tells you what you can do, and that apparently generous permission becomes its own trap. As an Aeon essay on Han’s work puts it, depression becomes “the definitive malaise of the achievement society,” the effect of being made to feel permanently behind our own ego-ideal.

Nobody forces you to hit a new personal best on a Sunday morning jog. Nobody mandates that you read two hundred books a year, or that you document every trip, meal, and workout for an audience that mostly is not paying attention. And yet the pressure is real, because it comes from inside. Han’s insight, distilled in that same Philosophy Break analysis, is that self-exploitation is more efficient than exploitation imposed from outside, because the exploited person believes they are freely pursuing self-realization. There is no boss to resent, no external villain, just an endless, self-administered performance review that never actually ends.

Han extends the argument in Psychopolitics, where he describes how neoliberal structures manage populations through seduction rather than coercion, turning the self into a product that must be continuously optimized for a market that, notably, was never asked whether it wanted the product in the first place. The wearable on my running acquaintance’s wrist is a small, literal instance of exactly this: a market interface strapped to a body, translating a walk in the park into a dataset that can disappoint you. It is worth noting that the science behind what these devices actually measure is shakier than the marketing suggests: a small controlled study from the University of Twente found no significant effect of smartwatch use on perceived stress or health anxiety at a group level, meaning the numbers we obsess over are not even reliably telling us what we think they are.

When the office trains the habit

None of this appears out of nowhere. Corporate culture has spent the last two decades training people to treat almost everything as a KPI, and I have written before about how organizations themselves rot from the inside when they trade substance for performance, rewarding the narrative of work over the actual completion of it. Once you spend forty, fifty, sixty hours a week inside a culture where visibility beats delivery and dashboards stay green regardless of what is actually happening underneath, it should not surprise anyone that the habit follows you home. If your professional identity is built on hitting numbers that were chosen mostly because they were easy to measure, it is a short step to applying the same lens to your cardio, your reading list, and your Duolingo streak.

Cybersecurity is, ironically, a field that should know better than most how dangerous it is to mistake the metric for the thing it measures. We spend entire careers explaining to executives that a green dashboard does not mean the network is secure, that a clean vulnerability scan does not mean there is no exposure, and that “we had zero incidents” often just means “we had zero incidents we detected.” Threat hunters know that the absence of an alert is not evidence of absence. And yet the same profession has some of the clearest documented evidence of what happens when the performative posture never switches off: SANS, citing a Devo industry survey, reports that 60 percent of SOC analysts said stress had led them to consider changing careers or leaving their jobs entirely. Many of the same people who understand this professionally will still let a smartwatch convince them that a slower 5K means a wasted morning. We have gotten remarkably good at questioning metrics at work and remarkably bad at questioning the ones we impose on ourselves.

I have also written about the quieter costs of this culture, from the people who hold teams together without ever showing up in a metric to the ordinary, unglamorous work that keeps organizations running while nobody is applauding. The common thread is the same one Han identifies: a culture that only recognizes what can be counted will eventually starve everything that cannot be, including rest, reflection, and the simple pleasure of doing something badly on a Tuesday evening because it feels good, not because it moves a number.

The guitar test

I play the guitar, badly and happily, mostly in the evening as a way to get my hands doing something that has nothing to do with a keyboard or a terminal. For years I treated even that as a project to optimize: scales, metronome drills, a mental checklist of technique I “should” master by a given date. At some point I noticed I had turned a set of six strings into another performance review, complete with self-imposed deadlines I never asked for and nobody else cared about.

What changed was intention, not talent. I started allowing myself to play something slowly, badly, and for no reason other than the fact that it sounded nice in the moment. No metronome, no tracker, no comparison to last month’s version of myself. It turns out that music, like running, like reading, only gives you something back if you occasionally let it be inefficient. The moment you subordinate it entirely to progress, you have converted a source of recovery into another item on the ledger, and Han would tell you that this is precisely how the performance society swallows leisure whole: not by banning rest, but by making rest justify itself in terms of output.

This matters for a very practical reason if you work in incident response, threat intelligence, or any high-vigilance field. Burnout in security is not usually caused by a single catastrophic incident. It is caused by the slow attrition of never fully switching off, of carrying the same optimizing, evaluating, always-on posture into the hours that were supposed to restore you. If your “downtime” is just another arena for self-assessment, you never actually rest, you just change the scoreboard.

Reclaiming the unproductive hour

Han’s more recent book, Vita Contemplativa, is less a diagnosis and more a proposed antidote, and it is worth taking seriously precisely because it does not romanticize laziness. His argument is that a life composed entirely of action, without contemplative pauses, cannot generate meaning, only output. Recovering the capacity for genuinely unproductive time (reading a book with no intention of finishing it on schedule, walking without a destination, running without a watch) is maintenance for the part of a person that generates judgment, creativity, and the ability to notice when something is actually wrong, as opposed to merely off-target.

Concretely, that can mean leaving the smartwatch at home occasionally and running by feel instead of by pace zone, which the Twente study suggests will not even cost you the biometric benefit you think it will. It can mean picking up a book you might abandon halfway through without logging it anywhere. It can mean sitting down with an instrument, a sketchbook, or a garden bed with absolutely no plan to get better at it this quarter. None of this requires quitting your job, deleting your fitness app, or moving to a cabin. It requires noticing, the way I did on that Sunday run, when an activity has quietly stopped being about the thing itself and started being about the number attached to it, and then choosing, deliberately and without apology, to let the number lose for once.

FAQ

Who theorized the negative effects of a performance-driven approach to life?

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book “The Burnout Society” (2010), described how modern life shifted from external discipline to self-imposed, voluntary self-exploitation, where the imperative “you can” replaces the older “you must” and proves just as oppressive.

Why does the performative approach to hobbies feel worse than at work?

At work, performance metrics at least have a stated business reason, however flawed. In hobbies like running, reading, or music, there is no external requirement at all, which makes the self-imposed pressure to optimize even harder to justify and even easier to internalize without noticing.

How can someone push back against constant self-optimization?

Byung-Chul Han’s later work, “Vita Contemplativa”, suggests deliberately protecting unmeasured, unproductive time such as walking without a watch, reading without a tracker, or playing an instrument badly on purpose, treating rest and inactivity as a form of resistance rather than as wasted time.