💡 Self-Exploitation series For the full picture of why “I have to do it perfectly” never goes quiet — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why “I Have to Do It Perfectly” Never Goes Quiet
Introduction: The Small Ache With No Particular Cause
No particularly unhappy event has occurred. You have work, and a place to live. And yet a small ache always accompanies the getting-through of each day. Among people who ride the wave well, you alone cannot match the rhythm of your breathing to theirs. When you feel this, most people search for the cause inside themselves: is my character weak, is my resilience short?
Plenty of people want to know the cause of their difficulty living. What this article places is the question one step before it: does that difficulty come from your personal weakness — or does the shape of the ground you stand on make you feel it?
Let me give the conclusion first. Much of the difficulty of living is not because you are weak, but because you are walking barefoot over a terrain, made by modernity, in which to discipline oneself without rest is right. The ache may be not proof of your defect but a fair response to the slope of the terrain.
📖 Contents
When Was the Air of “Diligence Is Right” Born?
Doubt, a little, the very air we breathe. To work without rest is good; to discipline oneself strictly is a virtue — we feel these as universal truths. But this is a historical product, born in a certain age, in a certain place.
The sociologist Max Weber traced the process by which a value internalising diligence, asceticism, and self-discipline as a moral duty became the spiritual foundation of modern society [Weber, 1905] (this drawing of the causation faces objections from present-day historians, and is best received as one influential reading). The virtues once spoken of in a religious context shed their religious garb with time and turned into a common sense beyond doubt: diligence is good, idleness is bad. The pressure you feel of I must keep it together did not well up naturally from within you; it is a slope this long history has carved into the ground of society.
Alienation — The State of Finding No Joy in Your Own Activity
On this terrain, our activity takes on a peculiar colour. The economist Marx drew it with the word alienation.
What Marx called alienation is the state in which the worker finds, in their own activity, not joy but drudgery [Marx, 1867]. It is your own doing, yet it cannot be felt as your own. You move in order to live, yet that movement exhausts you. This cold gap that opens between the activity and yourself is one economic true nature of what is called difficulty living. And what matters is that this is not weakness of an individual heart but something that arises structurally in one placed in the position of being able to live only by selling their labour power — he called it the “double freedom”, later organised into a system of economics by Uno Kōzō [Uno, 1964].
▸ How this sense of my activity not feeling like my own appears in daily work is treated in work feels hard not because your heart is weak.
What Should Be Blamed Is Not You but the Terrain
Come this far and the reason to change the blade’s direction comes into view. To turn difficulty living on yourself as proof of your weakness is like blaming the slope of the terrain on your clumsy walking.
I do not mean, of course, to blame the terrain and stand still. What I mean is the importance of naming the cause of the pain precisely. Seek the cause only inside yourself, and the prescription is always train yourself more, and you go on walking barefoot over sloping ground. Know that part of the cause lies in the terrain, and a different kind of step at last comes into view — put on shoes, choose a road with a gentler slope. Let me add one careful note. This is not a story about naming some particular person, or some particular position, as the villain. It is a viewpoint for quietly dissecting the structure itself, sedimented into society over long time, rather than anyone’s ill will.
Conclusion: See the Terrain, and the Way You Walk Changes
Difficulty living is not because you are weak but a fair response to the slope of a terrain, made by a modernity that makes a virtue of diligence and self-discipline. On that terrain, an alienation in which the activity cannot be felt as your own arises structurally.
What is needed is not to train yourself more, but to see precisely the shape of the ground you stand on. See the terrain, and a road other than enduring barefoot appears — a road of putting on shoes and steering toward the gentler slope. The whole picture is gathered in why “I have to do it perfectly” never goes quiet.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Weber, M. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905)
- Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
- Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten
