Sublime

Who wouldn’t want to live in Busytown, the setting of the iconic 1960s children’s books by the American illustrator Richard Scarry? His grocer cats and firefighting pigs are certainly busy; nobody in Busytown is idle—or if they are, they’re carefully hidden from view by the authorities, Pyongyang-style.

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself

1993 I volunteer for a one-year exchange program in Japan, where people work themselves to death—a phenomenon called karooshi—and are said to want to be Shinto when born, Christian when married, and Buddhist when they die. I conclude that most people are really confused about life.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life.

Jessica Abel,

The modern morality of “You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around” is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed.

As I started to experiment with how I spent my time, Taggart’s question remained in my head. I was fascinated by his claim that we lived in a time of “total work,” a state of existence in which work is such a powerful force that almost everyone ends up identifying as a worker first and foremost.