The Distraction of Anxiety, the Consumption of AI

Co-authoring a technical book in English, having articles recognized by international tech communities and featured on official channels, and collaborating with engineers worldwide on open-source software.

Looking back at the past year or two, I should feel certain that I have moved forward compared to who I used to be. Objectively speaking, there are milestones I have steadily built up. And yet, the obsessive thought whispering inside me—“This is still not enough,” “I must be recognized more”—refuses to vanish no matter how many achievements I accumulate.

I have a strong desire to work at a software company abroad in the future. Because of that, a burning sense of restlessness constantly pushes against my back: “If I don’t break through and stand out far more, I will never break out of my current environment.”

It was right around this time that I picked up The Ethics of Leisure and Boredom (Hima to Taikutsu no Rinrigaku) by philosopher Koichiro Kokubun.

As I turned the pages, I felt the endless anxiety I grapple with every day, along with the deep unease I feel toward how we interact with technology in the AI era, take on sharp, distinct contours.

Hunting Rabbits Named Anxiety

I am constantly terrified of the future. To dispel that fear, I feel I must be perfect. So, driven by impatience, I keep catching up on technology even on weekends, without rest. I do this because I believe that if I keep accumulating knowledge, the day will eventually come when my future self no longer has to carry any anxiety.

Yet reading Pascal’s discussion of “diversion” in the book struck me to the core.

Pascal observes that human beings cannot bear to sit quietly in a room. That is why they set out on rabbit hunts to capture prey. The crucial point here is that hunters do not genuinely desire the rabbit itself. If someone simply handed them a rabbit, they would not be satisfied. What they actually need is the time spent passionately running in pursuit. By throwing themselves into the chase, they continually avert their eyes from the boredom and the sense of their own nothingness that strike the moment they stop.

Isn’t my relentless catch-up on technology doing the exact same thing?

I thought I was running to eliminate anxiety about the future. In truth, unable to endure the “nobody” I face whenever I stand still, or the boredom that follows, I may simply be numbing my anxiety by the very act of running.

Psychology has the term “hedonic treadmill” (hedonic adaptation). No matter how much we desire a particular environment or achievement, once we attain it, we quickly adapt and regress to our baseline level of happiness—or dissatisfaction. The moment I finished co-authoring the book in English, and the moments my work was recognized in international communities, I felt genuine joy. Yet that relief evaporated in an instant, quickly overtaken by the recurring obsession: “This is not enough; I cannot stay in the same place.” Even if I were to reach some mythical sanctuary completely liberated from every anxiety, what awaits there might not be peace at all, but the most unbearable fate for a human being: boredom.

…At an intellectual level, I can comprehend this philosophical framework. Yet speaking honestly, reality is never forgiving enough to be settled by clean platitudes like “living with anxiety is what makes us human.” Physically and emotionally, the stress of this anxiety is intensely uncomfortable and hard to endure. Long before I fear the boredom of an anxiety-free future, I want to shave away the acute discomfort tightening in my chest right now, as quickly as possible. And so, unable to bear that discomfort, I find myself spending my precious weekends writing code and chasing after new technologies yet again.

Unease at “Consuming” AI Tokens on the Ground

This impatience has created an even more tangled distortion alongside the rapid rise of AI.

In the day-to-day reality of work, we operate under rigid constraints of cost, timelines, and budgets. When delivering a system to clients is the highest priority, there is no luxury to leisurely unravel underlying mechanisms. What is demanded is speed and quality comparable to AI, and as a result, delegating tasks to AI by burning tokens—even while bypassing our own understanding—takes precedence.

Particularly within an organization, from a short-term perspective, an engineer who uses AI to bypass deep comprehension and quickly deliver “something that works” is often evaluated far more favorably.

Yet as a software professional, when I let something pass simply because “it seems to work,” the underlying guilt and chill down my spine cannot be ignored.

Over the long haul, when critical incidents occur or when pivotal architectural decisions must be made, the engineers who bring true velocity and genuine productivity are those who understand the foundations and internal mechanics from low levels to high abstractions. And yet, the immediate pace and evaluation metrics of the organization do not afford the time required for that understanding.

Bypassing comprehension, burning AI tokens, and merely receiving “something that miraculously runs”—this practice does little more than pile up “understanding debt,” churning out little more than the disposable digital waste seen across the web.

Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the consumer society, The Ethics of Leisure and Boredom illuminates the vital difference between “consumption” and “waste” (or luxury). “Consumption” does not mean savoring an object for what it is; it means endlessly swapping through newly appearing signs, trends, and superficial differences. Because signs possess no substance, no matter how many times we exchange them, we are never satisfied, trapped in perpetual hunger.

Rushing to keep up with delivery deadlines and burning AI tokens while tossing away deep understanding: this was precisely the state of having technology “consumed” out from under me. I pay money, consume tokens, and nothing remains in my head. Continuing to work this way sparked a genuine fear that the very value of my existence as an engineer was being hollowed out.

”Wasteful” Immersion to Expand the Brain’s Index

On the other hand, the remedy for boredom presented in the book was reclaiming the human capacity for “waste” (luxury)—in the sense of generous immersion. “Waste” means receiving an object fully and savoring it to completion. To truly enjoy something, one needs knowledge, language, and the discipline (cultivation) required to receive it. Just as one refines their palate to appreciate delicate culinary flavors, savoring something deeply has an inherent limit—a true satisfaction—and embodies a distinctly human richness.

For a long time, far more than standard application feature development, I have felt a deep passion for the less glamorous layers: platform infrastructure, developer experience, and quality engineering. Understanding the mechanisms running beneath the surface—protocols, infrastructure, type systems, and architectural philosophies—brings an intellectual joy that nothing else matches.

From a short-term, hyper-efficiency mindset, digging into the mechanics behind code that AI could write in seconds might look like an unnecessary detour. Yet moving to Tokyo, in part to easily attend various tech conferences and study groups, was driven by this exact desire: to expand my “brain’s index.”

As long as we live as human beings, the deciding factor is how many diverse, deep indexes—cabinets of inquiries—we can establish in our minds. When confronting unknown domains where we don’t even know what we don’t know, without an internal index, we cannot even formulate the right questions to ask AI. To enrich this index, I want to learn computer science from the ground up once again, and especially in this era dominated by AI, I firmly believe that taking the time to write code by hand remains indispensable.

Instead of swallowing AI outputs whole and consuming them, we can chew on those outputs and conceptual models through dialogue and reading, weaving them into our own accumulated experiences. In modern times, that is the most luxurious “waste of time,” an intellectual adventure. Refusing to merely consume technology in an efficiency-obsessed world, and instead taking the time to savor it deeply—only through that patient accumulation of understanding can our unique individuality and humanity as engineers emerge.

Living with the Discomfort of Anxiety, Refusing to Stop Understanding

Even if I eventually succeed in working at an overseas software company, this anxiety and impatience will likely never vanish cleanly. Once one goal is met, another deficiency will present itself, and I will inevitably push myself with “Still not enough.”

While I yearn for a tranquil life devoid of anxiety, if I were to actually arrive in a world where all anxiety had vanished, what waited for me might well be the most unbearable boredom, stripped of the feeling of being truly alive.

That is not to say I intend to act like a wise elder and declare, “Let us love our anxiety.” Anxiety remains deeply uncomfortable, stressful, and something I would escape immediately if given the chance. Even so, I refuse to choose a path where I jump at cheap diversions just to run from that discomfort, living on the shallow “consumption” of technology.

If anxiety stirs in my chest, I will sit at my desk and face it, discomfort and all. Even as I feel swept along by the sheer velocity of AI, I will dig in my heels, write code by hand, relearn fundamental computer science, and refuse to surrender the luxury of savoring technology to the fullest.

Looking back, setting aside efficiency and immediacy to read this book carefully and confront my own emotions was, in itself, the first luxurious “waste” I had savored in a very long time.

Burning through the diversion of anxiety, yet refusing to stop understanding. In an age where everything is so rapidly consumed, I believe that is the only true form of sincerity I have to remain myself.