Not Working Quotes

“If the constraints of sheer survival are loosened, we can stop not because we're too frightened to move or too exhausted from doing too much, but to discover what it is we might want to do and who we might want to be.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“We dislike labour because it makes us experience the day on terms that are not our own.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“So invested is our manically productive culture in the image of us as active and purposeful beings that we seek to erase or destroy all evidence to the contrary — the slacker must put on a suit, get a job, lose his benefits and make himself useful. Harmlessly ineffective as he may be, we hate and fear him for showing us the useless dimension of our own selfhood, for voicing our own impulse not to go to work today, or tomorrow.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“The manic productivity of capitalism, the demands and aspirations of social status and the mechanical rhythms of industrialism all corral the individual into a perpetual state of anxious and compliant activity.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Being is the essential antidote to the non-stop inertia of doing, a way of resisting the gravity that drags us downwards.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Not working has almost always been valued only to the extent that it serves the cause of work. It is time we spoke up for not working, in all its creative possibilities, as its own value.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Take a day at the shopping centre, sold to us as an invigorating break from the rigours of work. Does it not feel more like an extension of it, blurring the line between work and 'free' time?”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“The elevation of the Sabbath to sacred status hints to us that being is a higher mode of existence than doing.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“We find ourselves suspended between a compulsion to do too much and a wish to do nothing.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working