Today, many people experience the feeling of being immersed in a kind of endless race. It is not necessarily direct external pressure, but a diffuse demand that runs through different areas of life, such as work, health, relationships or personal development. In this context, everyday life can be lived as a continuous process of optimisation, in which there always seems to be the possibility of performing more, improving or reaching a more efficient version of oneself. To this phenomenon is added constant social comparison, intensified by permanent access to social media and idealised life models, which favours the perception that others are achieving greater well-being or balance, often generating feelings of inadequacy or negative self-evaluation.
In this framework, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described a relevant change in contemporary societies, consisting of the shift from a logic based on external obligation, expressed in “you must”, to a logic based on positive self-demand, expressed in “you can”. This displacement does not eliminate pressure, but transforms it, since the mandate stops being perceived as something imposed from outside and becomes internalised as a constant personal demand. In this way, the difficulty of reaching certain goals is not usually interpreted as the result of contextual or structural factors, but often as an individual failure, which can favour the appearance of emotions such as guilt, frustration or a persistent feeling of inadequacy.
When this dynamic of self-demand is maintained over time, it can generate various psychological consequences, among them the difficulty of resting without guilt, the feeling of not doing enough, and the tendency to turn practically any aspect of life into a project of continuous improvement. In some cases, this can contribute to a state of emotional and mental exhaustion in which the person experiences that, regardless of what they do, they never reach a stable or sufficient level of satisfaction.
Faced with this logic of permanent performance, different psychological and philosophical approaches have pointed to the importance of recovering spaces of non-instrumentalised experience, that is, areas of life that are not oriented exclusively to productivity or constant optimisation. This implies recognising that not everything must be turned into a measurable or improvable goal, and that rest, error or pause are a legitimate part of human experience.
In this sense, a valuable life cannot be reduced solely to its level of performance or efficiency, but can be understood as one that allows a certain degree of subjective appropriation, that is, the possibility of living it in a way that is coherent with one's own values, limits and needs, without being permanently at the service of external demands.