The illusion of freedom

From External Discipline to Self-Pressure

To understand this change, we need to see that the way society manages people has changed.

Modern society has not abolished external discipline. Instead, it has added a more efficient form of self-pressure. In the past, society relied more on managers, institutions, and discipline to organize labor through "you should" and "you must not." That pressure was relatively visible, and therefore easier to resist.

Today, society more often speaks through "you can," "you are capable," and "become a better version of yourself." External demands for production are transformed into a person's active pursuit of self-worth.

We are no longer only passively required to work. We begin to demand that we become more efficient, more impressive, and more irreplaceable. This is the hidden force of modern achievement culture: it does not only pressure people from the outside. It also teaches people to read that pressure as free choice, personal ambition, and self-realization.

The Myth of Infinite Potential

Behind this self-drive often lies a myth of "infinite potential": as long as we work hard enough, we can keep breaking through limits and become better versions of ourselves.

This claim does have a positive side. It can encourage people to overcome inertia and resist fatalism. It gives people an upward pull, making them believe that destiny is not completely determined by birth, environment, or the past.

But once this claim becomes absolute, it hides a basic fact: people are not limitless resources. Our time, energy, emotional stability, and bodily endurance all have real limits.

Once "growth" is understood as endless extraction, we easily begin to treat the self as a mine to be developed, rather than as a life that needs rest and protection.

The Appropriated Faustian Narrative

When this borderless self-extraction leads to fatigue or even collapse, public language often gives it a romantic explanation, presenting compulsive striving as a noble spirit of exploring the unknown and rising above mediocrity.

This is a "Faustian narrative" appropriated by performance culture: it treats exhaustion as the price of struggle, anxiety as proof of ambition, and damaged health as a necessary sacrifice for excellence.

The danger of this illusion is that it ignores the body that has to bear fatigue and damage. It also ignores real conditions such as resources, class, and environment. Structural pressure is pushed onto personal will, as if someone can keep overdrawing themselves as long as they are determined enough.

More importantly, it weakens the rightful place of health, peace, and low-intensity living. If someone does not want to keep burning themselves out, they are treated as not brave enough. If someone wants ordinariness, stability, and slowness, they are made to defend themselves.

The Loop of Self-Pressure

From this, modern society forms a hidden loop: exploiter and exploited overlap in the same person.

The individual becomes both the supervisor who sets goals and the worker driven by them. The same person demands continuous optimization and then bears the pressure that optimization produces. This self-exploitation, in which master and servant occupy the same body, is efficient precisely because it feels like freedom.

When we work overtime, study, and plan, we often feel that we are pursuing ideals and improving our competitiveness. Pressure no longer comes only from external commands. It also comes from the question, "What kind of person should I become?"

Within this structure, resistance becomes harder and more ambiguous. It is difficult to tell whether you are resisting an external system or your own ambition, protecting yourself or avoiding growth. Freedom itself has been turned into performance.

When Pressure Turns Inward

Over time, when people suffer setbacks in the achievement system or fail to meet expected levels of efficiency, this pressure quickly turns inward.

We are unlikely to first suspect that the evaluation system is excessive. Nor are we likely to ask whether the goals are reasonable. Instead, we blame ourselves for lacking discipline, lacking ability, or managing emotions poorly. This inward attack is one of the typical psychological consequences of modern performance culture.

Depression, anxiety, and occupational burnout therefore cannot be reduced to personal failure. They certainly involve medical, physiological, and psychological factors, but in many cases they also reflect the long-term overdrawing of physical and mental resources by the achievement system.

The problem should not be framed only as "this person is not strong enough." It should be examined again: have our evaluation structures and self-expectations already exceeded the range that human beings can bear stably over the long term?

Learning to Recognize Human Limits Again

When a person manages themselves for a long time as a project, an asset, or a machine, life slowly loses its own rhythm.

The problem today is not that we desire growth, but that we increasingly struggle to accept an existence that does not need growth as its reason.

Recognizing human limits again is not a denial of effort, nor a praise of laziness. It simply asks us to recover a more basic judgment: people do not exist for continuous output, and growth should not require life to be exhausted.

A truly healthy life is not only about becoming stronger, faster, and better. It also includes the ability to stop, and to let oneself exist peacefully in moments without proof, metrics, or returns.

But when our minds have already been reshaped by efficiency, and stopping immediately brings us into emptiness, how can we recover this ease? The answer may not lie in deeper or more complex thinking. It may be hidden in the real perception of every breath and every touch.

Next: How Meaning Appears Between Body and World

If performance society makes people constantly manage themselves as projects, assets, and machines, then the truly difficult part is this: even when we stop, we may not have truly returned to life.

Often, the body has left work, but the mind remains inside the inspection system. Rest must prove effective, entertainment must prove useful, leisure must prove worthwhile, and even the moment of "doing nothing" must be interpreted as another means of restoring productivity.

So the next step cannot be simple advice to "relax a little." What we truly need to ask is:

When people have grown used to measuring everything by output and growth, where can the sense of life begin again?

In the next article, we will begin with Merleau-Ponty's view of the body and discuss how bodily experience can bring people back from abstract self-evaluation into the concrete world:

Meaning is not first proven in the mind. It slowly appears when the body becomes involved in the world again.