Kent Berridge

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The feeling I could not name had a name all along.

For months during the writing of *You On AI*, I described a specific experience — the three-in-the-morning session where the exhilaration drains away but the typing continues, the morning after when coffee tastes like obligation, the pull to reopen the laptop that arrives before I have finished closing it. I called it productive addiction. I called it the inability to find the off switch. I held it up against Csikszentmihalyi's flow and Han's auto-exploitation and asked which framework fit, and neither fit cleanly, and I kept writing anyway because the book needed finishing and the tool was right there and the next prompt was always available.

Kent Berridge handed me the missing diagnostic.