Henry Miller: Few Can Escape the Treadmill

Our culture convinces far too many of us to chase things that are not aligned with our ideal states of being. We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”⁠1 But constantly trying to be “better” can pu

"We could change it now. Robots are doing all the work. Human beings -- all human beings -- could now be on perpetual vacation. That's what bugs me. If society had been designed for it somehow, we could all be on vacation instead of on welfare. Everyone on the planet could be living in luxury. Instead, they are planning to kill us off. Did you

How the generation who worked and fought for our ability to live how we wanted to would be shocked to see not a painter, or a poet, or a concert violinist, or even a philosophy professor among us.

The chaos of urban centers “stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel in an influential essay from 1903, “until they can finally produce no reaction at all.” As anyone who’s lived in a city will know, it’s easy to feel overstimulated, and too much of that feeling can render you numb and disconnected from the

“If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?”

Our culture gives us what Henry Miller called ‘the air-conditioned nightmare.’