142: Why You Feel Guilty When You Rest - The Logic of Total Work

Why You Feel Guilty When You Rest - The Logic of Total Work. In today’s Philosophies For Life, we are going to be taking a look at exactly why you feel guilty when you rest, and how to reclaim your right to simply exist.

It is Sunday afternoon. Your chores are done. Your laundry is folded. The inbox is—miraculously—empty. You finally have permission to relax. But... you can't. Instead of peace, you feel a phantom vibration in your pocket. A tightening in your chest. A voice in the back of your head starts whispering: "You should be doing something. You are wasting time. You are falling behind." This has a name: 'Leisure Sickness.' It is when you actually feel sick the moment you stop working." Now, you might tell yourself: "I’m just Type A" or "It’s just my personality." Indeed, we use these labels to convince ourselves that this anxiety is a genetic quirk—that we were simply born this way.
But that is a lie. You were not born unable to sit still. You were trained to be unable to sit still. You are the victim of a specific, invisible philosophical architecture designed to make you impossible to satisfy. You have been infected by what the German philosopher Josef Pieper, in his famous book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, called "The Logic of Total Work."
It is the belief that a human being is nothing more than a worker, and that any moment not spent producing value is a moment wasted.

Topics covered - 
Introduction - 00:00 - 01:47 
Act I: The Internalized Panopticon - 01:47 - 06:09 
Act II: The Addiction to Cortisol - 06:09 - 08:29
Act III: The Fear of Being Nobody - 08:29 - 11:54
Act IV: The Theft of Leisure - 11:54 - 14:39 
Act V: The Great Refusal - 14:39 - 20:09 
Act VI: The Right to Be Useless - 20:09 - 21:21 
I hope you enjoyed listening to this audio - Why You Feel Guilty When You Rest and hope you reclaim your right to simply exist.