The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive. If one abandoned one’s individuality and dissolved into the life process of the species entirely, one would at least have the serenity [Gelassenheit] of an animal. But the late-modern animal laborans is anything but animalian. It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic. There must be another answer to why all human activities in late modernity are sinking to the level of mere laboring—and, more still, why such hectic nervousness prevails.
