Why do I push myself harder than my boss does?

Because the pressure moved inside, and it is far more effective there.

Han's claim is that we have left the disciplinary society — the world of walls, timetables and supervisors, where power worked by forbidding — and entered an achievement society that works by permitting. Nobody tells you what you may not do. You are told you can do anything, be anything, optimise anything. The imperative is not obey but achieve, and it does not arrive from a superior. It arrives as ambition, in your own voice.

This produces self-exploitation, which is more efficient than the coercive kind for a simple reason: it feels like freedom. You are not being made to answer emails at eleven. You are choosing to, and each choice looks like initiative.

It also removes the enemy. A worker facing an exploiter can organise. A worker who is their own exploiter has nobody to negotiate with and no one to be angry at except themselves — which is why the characteristic pathology has shifted from repression to exhaustion, and why burnout presents as personal failure rather than as a grievance.

The uncomfortable corner: if it is genuinely your own doing, then most of what is offered as help — better boundaries, time management — is more of the same instrument.