Byung-Chul Han

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The night I almost admired my own exhaustion was the night I knew something was broken.

I had just closed the laptop after fourteen hours with Claude. The work was extraordinary. Features shipped, architecture resolved, a product vision clarified in ways that would have taken weeks of meetings a year ago. I felt the particular glow of a person who has been maximally useful. And then, walking to the kitchen for water I had forgotten to drink, I caught myself thinking: This is what peak performance feels like.

That thought should have been a warning. It was a celebration instead.

Byung-Chul Han would have recognized the moment instantly. He has spent thirty years diagnosing exactly this condition — the point where the whip and the hand