The closer technology brings us to the cusp of feeling like we are the gods of our time, the more incredibly offensive it seems to be reminded of all the ways in which we still aren’t. So you get this utterly bizarre situation where the world speeds up and gets more and more efficient, and we have all this technology for saving time, but it

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It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the... See more

As if to rub it in, some anthropologists tell us that thousands of years ago people had much more time available to them than their hunting, gathering and child-rearing required. Three or four hours of work a day paid the bills, so they had a lot of downtime. Then came agriculture, and eventually industrialization, and somehow these helpful... See more