Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society is small enough to read quickly and sharp enough to keep echoing afterward. It doesn’t offer tips for balancing your calendar or managing stress; it offers a cultural diagnosis. Han argues that modern power doesn’t primarily function by telling people “you must not,” but by inviting them into an endless “you can, ”a world of projects, initiative, motivation, and self-optimization. That shift changes control from something imposed from the outside to...

Hi, I’m Angela. I’m an ADHD coach and a technology consultant, and I’ve spent a lot of time in conversations with people who are capable, driven, and genuinely trying, and still feel like they’re falling behind some invisible standard. In my coaching work, a theme kept showing up: perfectionism and the pressure to perform and to please others . Not always in loud, obvious ways. More like a constant background hum, the sense that you have to be impressive to be safe, over-productive to be...

This site is for public essays about a simple idea with enormous reach: language shapes what we value and it trains us to pursue worth through performance. We learn the standards through stories. We absorb them through slogans. We rehearse them through the identities we’re offered: high performer, disciplined one, optimized self, uncommon among the common. I write here to make those scripts visible. Not to stand outside culture, pointing a finger. To stand inside it with sharper attention so...