Saved by Prabjyot Sudan
Henry Miller: Few Can Escape the Treadmill
“Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.”
Gus Guerrero added
Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a symptom of deficient vitality, and observed a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing
Marty Bell added
People were, he warned, living “on a treadmill of continuous checking.”
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
I quite agree that men lose their creative instincts when they are fed thus without raising a hand. And I can see that it is tempting to accuse industry of this evil. But we lack perspective for the judgment of transformations that go so deep. What are the hundred years of the history of the machine compared with the two hundred thousand years of t
... See moreAntoine de Saint-Exupéry • Wind, Sand And Stars (Harvest Book)
kev and added
his description of humanity in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) appears to be as somber as it was prophetic: “Narrow specialists without minds, pleasure seekers without heart; in their conceit, these nullities imagine they have climbed to a level of humanity never before attained.”
Tim Leberecht • The Business Romantic
juarry added
“The mass phenomenon of loneliness...has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”
Ted Gioia • What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt
