Effort is Addiction
by Terao Tetsuya
Book Club Date:November 2025
📖 Book Summary
*Effort Is an Addiction* is the latest essay collection by Tetsuya Terao, a novelist and former Google engineer. Continuing the cold, precise prose and the distinctive "high-pressure feel" of the tech industry from his earlier *Bullets Are the Rest of Life*, this book is his reflection on—and confession about—"effort" as a modern-day religion. Starting from a childhood form where he had to check a box about his family's financial status, he writes his way to the downfall of Silicon Valley geniuses, the world-weariness of elite athletes, and the souls alienated by precision algorithms. This book questions why we treat survival as labor and labor as meaning. Through the struggles of these "straight-A students," it redefines how we relate to fear, loneliness, and the three inner voices telling us "not good enough."
✍️ Reading Notes
One of the book's most heartbreaking chapters concerns the story of former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. This genius who once tried to "design happiness" through corporate culture, after stepping down from his role, threw himself into a social experiment with no street address: "Country Zero." In that utopia where tarot cards served as tickets and seashells as currency, he drifted into the fog of drugs and hallucination, severing all real-world human connections. This reveals a cruel truth: no amount of possession can prevent an individual's self-destruction. When effort and achievement are pushed to their extreme, if the inner void isn't addressed, even the grandest social experiment is just accelerant for the fall. Another profound insight concerns "the loneliness of the elite." Go master Cho Chikun and runner Hitomi Niiya have both publicly expressed "hatred" for the thing they're best at. For those at the top of the pyramid, the pressure is no longer "getting better" but "how not to get worse" and "how to surpass human limits." When a passion is replaced by systematized, repetitive training, the original love often erodes into resentment. They're not only locked into their skills but also labeled by their identity—they're no longer permitted to be just ordinary people. This "fate of the exceptional" is a loneliness of coexisting with the abyss, a self-alienation from which there's no return. Finally, the author mentions a childhood memory: his mother insisting on checking the "comfortably well-off" box on a form about family finances, even though their life was far from comfortable. This wasn't just a checkbox—it was a child's first encounter with "respectability" and "expectation." Compared to European or American education systems, this practice of having children self-assess their class is extremely rare, as it prematurely labels them. This highlights something in Asian culture: we often have to learn "who you are (your position in the social hierarchy)" before we're allowed to be ourselves. This obsession with "respectability" is the original virus of the "effort addiction," making us spend the rest of our lives overdrawing our energy to maintain that checked-off "respectability." After reading this book, you realize Terao isn't denying effort—he's reminding us not to let "effort" become an addictive drug for avoiding self-confrontation. What we may need to learn isn't how to run faster, but how not to be swallowed by inner emptiness when we stop.
💬 Discussion Points
- 1Tony Hsieh's story shows a huge chasm between "designed happiness" and "genuine connection." In your career or current studies, have you ever tried to "design" your life through some system or logic, only to discover that certain emotions and vulnerabilities simply can't be quantified?
- 2Elite athletes' "hatred" for what they do best actually stems from excessive binding of identity to skill. When you're labeled as an "excellent designer" or "highly educated international student," have you ever felt that the label strips you of the "right to fail"?
- 3Regarding that form where "comfortably well-off" was checked: amid the cultural clash between Asia and Europe, how do you now re-examine the concept of "respectability"? If you were to redefine your "self-identity" today, setting aside social class and job titles, what three adjectives would you use to describe your authentic self?