Jeffrey Kaplan: The machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. By 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.
The comfort of consumption: Lisa: Hey, Tubby! Want another Pop Tart, Tubby? Bart: I'm comfortable with the way I am.
Decius: Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.
Randall Munroe: What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Is there an app for that?
Paul Markillie: However you do it, you won't beat the computer.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.
Decius: It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.
Stefan Klein: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
Robert Sapolsky: The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.
Dan Soltzberg: There's a funny Zen saying: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.
Nora Johnson: In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.
David Foster Wallace: The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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