Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal. (Dickens, visiting in 1842, remarked, "After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.") Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity.
Sloth was no longer so much a sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible -- that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.
...
BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1853),
acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robber-baron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism,
nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow?
The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee
By THOMAS PYNCHON
New York Times
[emphasis JS]
Thanks to Derek Robinson
Describing almost all of us 20 years ago, Godin writes in The Icarus Deception,
“The unsure employee is putty in the hands of the manager seeking to give directions. When you decide you’re not talented enough or not ready to speak up, when you buy the line about not being well trained or well born enough to make a difference, you
cede your power to those in authority.”
Seth is
not describing work ethic. He is describing conformity; conformity, in most cases, to a value system of endless hours at the office at the expense of our personal lives. Worst of all, our efforts were not met, in most cases, with a corresponding likelihood of those efforts returning what we were chasing — partnership, a corner office, a huge slug of equity that gets cashed out when the company is sold … In some cases, the effort panned out. In most, it did not.
Millennials Will Work Hard, Just Not for Your Crappy Job
Brett Cenkus
TheStartup
Work time too often bleeds into home time as work loads are impossible to manage as task piles upon task. Or at any time the phone threatens to go with a "request" to come in, shattering your free time and reminding you your time is their largesse. Too many workplaces are permanently short staffed, and the experience of work is a dizzying affair of plate spinning and routine.
Life isn't for enjoyment, it's a treadmill for countless millions who
realise when they reach retirement that they're too knackered or too ill to do the things they always wished to. Life is far too short to be spent and bent in involuntary servitude, especially when work can be planned and shared out equitably.
The Basic Income and the Cult of Work
Phil
ALL THAT IS SOLID ...
As if all this is dependent on the archaic compulsion of exchanging our capacity to labour for wages or a salary. Technology should not be deployed to create more bullshit jobs so more people can spend their best years doing meaningless, socially useless tasks. It should be deployed to reduce the working week, to spread the wealth we create, and to make us free from the necessity of waged labour. The future has to be something better than a human being chained to a desk, forever. And it totally can be.
