The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper.

He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.

Said Aristippus: “If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.”

Said Diogenes: “Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.”

— Anthony de Mello,
The Song of the Bird

“Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.”

— Diogenes, as quoted by Stobaeus in Anthology (IV. §31c. 88)

Haunted by the work ethic, our commitments remain difficult to defend; attempts to explain them often exhibit more the qualities of post hoc rationalizations than sufficient accounts of our motives. Yet the puzzle of our motivation would seem to be of little practical concern; when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead. Rather, our focus is generally confined to how “we shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day’”.

— Kathi Weeks,
The Problem with Work (chapter 1)

“The idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.”

— Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (chapter 5)

‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?

Why should we rise because ‘tis light?
Did we lie down because ‘twas night?

Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.


Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak as well as spy,

This were the worst that it could say,
That being well I fain would stay,

And that I loved my heart and honour so,
That I would not from him, that had them, go.


Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,

The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.

He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.

— John Donne, Break of Day

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

— William H. Davies, Leisure

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The Winds that will be howling at all hours

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. — Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

— William Wordsworth,
The World Is Too Much with Us

For moderns – for us – there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. Just taking our time, as we say. That is, letting time take us.

“Can you say,” I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from the age of nineteen in her monastery cell, “what the core of contemplative life is?”

“Leisure,” she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, “Prayer.” Or maybe “The search for God.” Or “Inner peace.” Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.

She saw I didn't see.

“It takes time to do this,” she said finally.

Her “this” being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet [Wordsworth] said, we lay waste our powers.

— Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (chapter 1)

There will be little drudgery in this better-ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone.

And not only drudges, but many other sorts of men and ways of living which loom large in the current social scheme will necessarily have dwindled in importance or passed away altogether.

There will be few professional fighting men or none at all, no custom-house officers; the increased multitude of teachers will have abolished large police forces and large jail staffs, mad-houses will be rare or non-existent; a worldwide sanitation will have diminished the proportion of hospitals, nurses, sick-room attendants, and the like; a world-wide economic justice, the floating population of cheats, sharpers, gamblers, forestallers, parasites, and speculators generally.

— Herbert G. Wells,
The Outline of History (chapter XLI. §4)

Paul's no-work-no-eat doctrine was directed by him only against the poor. All around him were the rich, virginally innocent of toil, and yet who were gorged to the gullet. Paul sharpens no dagger of invective for these.

— Bouck White,
The Call of the Carpenter (chapter XIV)

According to certain interpretations of Jesus (and his life and his teachings), he was some kind of anarchist insurrectionary – and it was Paul who turned the teachings of Jesus into an organized religion, which then became the opposite of what Jesus taught.

For example, Nietzsche:

In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings” [Jesus]; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.

—The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached—and against which he taught his disciples to fight—

Some radical (and unconventional) interpretations of Jesus Christ:

Max Stirner

from https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/811
to https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/815


Friedrich Nietzsche

from https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/820
to https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/850

(these are only some of Nietzsche's quotes on this theme)


Oscar Wilde

from https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/842
to https://news.1rj.ru/str/postLeftPosting/845

The division of labor implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the ‘general interest,’ but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labor is divided. And finally, the division of labor offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

— Karl Marx,
The German Ideology (chapter 1)

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

— Karl Marx,
The German Ideology (chapter 1)

Time Before Timetables

[In medieval Europe] there’s one set of problems you almost certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had “too much to do,” that you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short far more frequently than they are today, time wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to “save” it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during “work time.” And none of this was simply because things moved more slowly back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all.

— Oliver Burkeman,
Four Thousand Weeks (chapter 1)

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (by Oliver Burkeman)

The truth ... is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation.

— Oliver Burkeman,
Four Thousand Weeks (chapter 9)

If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.

— Simone de Beauvoir,
The Ethics of Ambiguity (III. §5)

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again.

But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.

The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

— Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer,
The Culture Industry