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“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”
― Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

“If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.”
― James Richardson

“The saying "Life is just one damn thing after another," is a gross overstatement. The damn things overlap.”
― The Cincinnati Enquirer

“The most fruitful breaks are often those we are or were forced to take by life.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The fact that they might still be alive in 5, 25, or even 50 yearsâ€� time is not enough to motivate fools to look after their bodies.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Too much light for the eyes is as useless as darkness.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Those who truly love their work have the tendency to get sick and tired of resting, and very quickly.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A restless mind makes a problem of a resting body.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss.

At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla.

Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.”
― Madeleine Bunting

“But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“Homo Defessus â€� Never before in human history has so many people considered their everyday tiredness (because they are so busy and have so much to do) as a badge of honor. We are living in the era of Homo Defessus, the exhausted man. I wonder if the historians of the distant future (if there will be any) will look back to our epoch and decide to give it a name: “The Dark Agesâ€�, because for the first time humans, not only deliberately sought exhaustion, but they were also convinced that this mentality is their pride, an indisputable token of greatness.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“This man was a high-powered operator, but also prone to overwork. He earned a high salary, but he couldn’t use it now that he was dead. He wore Armani suits and drove a Jaguar, but finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning. The very fact that he existed in this world would eventually be forgotten. “Such a shame, he was so young,â€� people might say. Or they might not.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Homo defessus â€� Never before in human history have so many people considered their everyday tiredness (because they are so busy and have so much to do) as a badge of honor. We are living in the era of Homo defessus, the exhausted man. I wonder if historians of the distant future (if there will be any) will look back at our epoch and decide to give it a name: “The Second Dark Ages,â€� because for the first time, humans not only deliberately sought exhaustion, but were also convinced that this mentality was their pride, an indisputable token of greatness.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Animals overwork only when they are working for humans.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Meditation is the most fruitful form of rest during which we are awake.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Overworking doing what you love is way more revitalizing than resting from doing what you hate.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Working for yourself does not make working too hard any less foolish.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Capitalism owes a third of its success to conspicuous consumption, and another third to the consumption of caffeine.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It is wise to be lazy, intermittently.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes.

According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“The analogy with the environment [crisis] is apt, because both forms of sustainability - human and environmental - have no market value, they cannot be bought and sold. Both fall into the category of what economists call the tragedy of the commons': in an unfettered market, they are subject to its depredations without any accounting for their true value. Just as the damage to the environment has become increasingly clear, so we will see in the coming decades a growing anxiety about the erosion of human sustainability as we witness an exponential rise in depression, stress and anxiety. It is the conditions of our working lives which are one of the main causes.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“What we have lost to a very great degree is the possibility of resistance, confrontation or reform of taking the struggle for freedom back into the workplace. Many of the private sector jobs worst hit by long hours and rising stress have a low rate of trade union membership. The number of workplaces with high union density and well-established collective bargaining fell from 47 per cent in 1980 to only 17 per cent in 1998.26 Two-thirds of all workplaces have no union presence at all.”
― Madeleine Bunting

“Work's enormous drain on time and energy is depriving relationships of care and dependence, the investment they urgently need right now. At the same time, it often adds new demands on those relationships as the stress and exhaustion spill over. Overwork erodes intimate relationships, which have never been so brittle and which, in a competitive, individualistic society, have never been so essential in supporting individual well-being, identity and security. Never have we so needed a place to call home, a place of refuge from the dictates of the market, from its crude calibration of value and its demands on us to perform. Yet at the very same moment, the time we have at home is shrinking, and the privacy we have there is fast disappearing.

What is in conflict here is a labour-market ethic of individual achievement and effort, versus older ethics of the dignity of dependence and the fulfilment of selflesness.”
― Madeleine Bunting

“As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life.

It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations â€� rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.'

This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.”
― Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives

“As a salaried employee you can make me work eighty hour weeks, but we will be parting company soon.”
― Steven Magee

“If you're happy, have found love, are surrounded by good people, doing what you like, and giving back to others, that's success. Selling your soul for a buck is not work the real price you pay. . .”
― Iris Apfel, Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon

“[t]he art of talking comes easier to some of us but others. For boys and men, so many of them still socialised in a myriad of destructive ways to hide weakness and took out their difficulties, the idea of sharing deep emotional pain with anyone is often unthinkable, even in the 21st century. When you are punished or mocked if you dare to express, or even have, feelings, you typically put a lot of effort into appearing strong and stoic. Except for anger. Male conditioning is much more accepting of anger, and emotion that is more about 'doing' that 'feeling'. Men are, generally speaking, more likely to deal with distress by doing something: overworking, sex, drinking, drugs, aggression, violence, suicide. What is suicide if not the most decisive of actions, after al. Small wonder then that the ultra-macho prison environment, where having emotions is seen as a sign of weakness, is full of men acting out their distress in harmful ways.”
― Kerry Daynes, The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist

“Once I slowed down and focused most of my attention on training my mind, my life transformed dramatically. I realized that overworking myself wasn’t close to being the answer.”
― Robin S. Baker

“The shiftworkers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But...
The shift was delayed seven minutes.
They did not get home for seven minutes.
The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.
Quotas were delayed by inoperative slidewalks for seven minutes.
He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, like chik chik chik, the others had fallen.
The System had been seven minutes' worth of disrupted.”
― Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman