Why Can't I Stop Working? The Autonomy Paradox Explained

Why Can’t I Stop Working When Nobody Is Making Me?

There is a short answer to the question and it is not flattering. You cannot stop working because the position of the person who would tell you to stop has been abolished, and the position of the person demanding more has been filled, internally, by you. That is not a metaphor. It is the documented architecture of modern work, and the paper trail runs from a dictionary office in New Jersey through a management journal to a set of experiments involving pedometers.

Start with the dictionary. In November 2006 the staff of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, an outfit in Hoboken, New Jersey, held their annual Word of the Year contest and gave the prize to Crackberry. The editors noted, with lexicographical satisfaction, that the word did double duty: it denoted both the device and the user. Pluto was a runner-up that year, having just been demoted from planet to dwarf planet, and the judges decided that the reclassification of an entire world was less significant than the fact that office workers had begun describing themselves as addicts of their own email and found this funny rather than alarming. The editors also recorded a name for the posture, the hunched devotional thumbing performed in lifts and at dinner tables: the Crackberry prayer. A prayer implies a recipient. Nobody at the dictionary asked who was being prayed to.

What is the autonomy paradox?

The autonomy paradox is the finding, named by Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates in a 2013 Organization Science study, that professionals who use their freedom to work anywhere and anytime end up working everywhere and all the time, and experience the whole arrangement as personal choice.

The professionals in the study described their mobile email in the language of liberation. Being reachable at any hour gave them flexibility and peace of mind. It was, they explained, evidence of their autonomy. They could work from the beach. What the researchers documented was the machinery running underneath the testimony. Because each professional individually chose to be reachable at any hour, the group’s collective expectation of availability rose. Because the expectation rose, each professional individually had to be a little more reachable, which raised the expectation again. Nobody chaired this process. There were no minutes. It simply ratcheted, one voluntary act at a time, until the people who had chosen to work anywhere were working everywhere. They had used their freedom to construct, with no architect and considerable enthusiasm, the exact arrangement freedom was supposed to protect them from.

Why do you work harder for yourself than any boss would demand?

Byung-Chul Han’s answer is that the economy changed its management structure without filing the paperwork, and self-management turned out to be the most productive kind ever invented. His 2010 book The Burnout Society reads like a memo about a corporate restructure that was never announced because there was no one whose job it was to announce it.

The old regime, the one Foucault spent his career mapping, was a disciplinary society. Its instruments were the wall, the timetable and the word no. You were told where to be, and watched to make sure you were there, and the people it broke came out in the recognisable shapes of the madman and the criminal. Han’s claim is that this regime has been decommissioned, not because anyone objected to it but because a better model became available. The achievement society runs on the word can. It has no need of walls, since nobody is trying to leave. It has no need of supervisors, since the position has been filled internally. The achievement-subject, Han’s term for the modern working person, exploits itself, voluntarily, with an initiative no external boss could ever have extracted, and experiences the arrangement as freedom. Exploiter and exploited are now the same person, which from an administrative point of view is an enormous saving. The old boss had an office you could storm and a face you could hate. Its successor was relocated inward, where it conducts a continuous performance review with a sample size of one, and unlike the old boss it does not go home at half five, because it is home. This is the same machinery that turned exhaustion into a status currency: the tiredness is the receipt, and the receipt gets displayed.

Han is doing philosophy here, not measurement, and it would be easy to file the whole thing under European pessimism if the empirical record did not keep wandering over to agree with him.

Does tracking an activity make it feel like work?

Under documented conditions, yes. In 2016 Jordan Etkin, a marketing professor at Duke, published six experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research showing that measuring an enjoyable activity increases how much of it people do while reducing how much they enjoy it, because the count drags attention to output, and attention to output is the signature of work.

The design was simple. Give people an ordinary pleasant activity, walking or reading, and give some of them a running count of their output. The counted groups reliably did more. They walked further and read more pages. They also enjoyed it less, continued with it less afterwards, and reported lower wellbeing. No employer was present and no money changed hands. The number did the entire job by itself. Etkin’s participants had, in effect, hired themselves as their own line managers for the task of going for a walk, and then experienced the standard consequence of being line-managed.

The effect has edges, and the edges are honest. Give people an explicit goal and the counting can start to please them. Surveys of serious cyclists find them devoted to their bike computers and enjoying every quantified kilometre, though a cynic might observe that serious cyclists resolved the play-versus-work question some time ago, and did not resolve it in favour of play.

Is the autonomy paradox actually real?

The centre of the finding is firm and the edges are contested. When researchers tested the paradox against large European survey data, a 2020 study of nearly four thousand remote e-workers mostly failed to find it, and argued the whole question turns on the difference between autonomy over your goals and discretion over your schedule. The idea has escaped into culture, where it puts on weight whenever it is left unsupervised, so the claim worth keeping is the narrow, strange one the evidence holds up: the availability ratchet is real, it is collective, and no individual inside it experiences themselves as doing anything except exercising choice.

Put the two literatures side by side and the shape of the thing appears. The ratchet turns without a hand on it, and the count gets read by no one in authority, because there is no longer anyone in authority to read it. The whole apparatus that discipline once required, the supervisor and the timesheet and the inspection, has been miniaturised, distributed and installed at the user’s own request, frequently at the user’s own expense, in a device the user queued to buy. Foucault imagined the watchtower internalised. He did not quite anticipate the five-star review the prisoners would leave for it.

Who is all this work for?

Which leaves the question the dictionary staff hovered over in 2006 and declined to ask. The achievement-subject compiles a continuous report: the step count, the hours, the reply sent within the hour, the performance that never quite ends. Reports go up a chain. This one goes up to nothing. There is no desk where the numbers land, and there is no signature that, once obtained, would let the reporting stop. The professionals on the beach were not exactly working for their firms, and the walkers with the pedometers were certainly not walking for Duke. The work was addressed to a vacancy.

Back in Hoboken, the editors were more right than they had any professional reason to be. One word for the device and the user, because the distinction was already closing. And a prayer, they called the posture, which turns out to be the accurate word too, in the oldest sense: a message composed with complete devotion, sent daily, to an office where no one has ever sat.

FAQ

What is the autonomy paradox?

The autonomy paradox is the finding that professionals who use their freedom to work anywhere, at any time, end up working everywhere, all the time. Each individual choice to be available raises the group’s collective expectation of availability, which demands more availability from each individual. The term comes from a 2013 Organization Science study by Mazmanian, Orlikowski and Yates.

What does Byung-Chul Han mean by the achievement society?

In The Burnout Society, Han argues that the old disciplinary society of rules, walls and supervisors has been replaced by an achievement society that runs on the word “can” instead of the word “no”. The modern working person exploits themselves voluntarily, with more initiative than any external boss could extract, and experiences this self-exploitation as freedom.

Does tracking your steps or habits reduce enjoyment?

It can. Jordan Etkin’s 2016 experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research found that measuring pleasant activities like walking or reading increased how much people did them but reduced enjoyment, continued engagement and wellbeing, because counting shifts attention to output and makes play feel like work. The effect softens when people have an explicit goal.

What is self-exploitation?

Self-exploitation is Byung-Chul Han’s term for the arrangement in which the same person occupies the role of exploiter and exploited. Instead of a boss demanding more output, the pressure comes from within, framed as ambition or self-improvement, which makes it more efficient than external exploitation and much harder to recognise or resist.