Book of the Week(end) - Not Working by Josh Cohen

Always a pleasure to come across a new addition to the rapidly growing literature on the subject of "anti-work", and here's the latest: psychoanalyst Josh Cohen's newly released Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. 

From Cohen's recent essay in the Idler magazine: 

"An entire repetoire of moods - boredom, indifference, lassitude, any state of mind that orient us to aimlessness, zoning out, slacking off - is being excluded from the range of permissible inner states. This means the exclusion of a rich and important seam of our humanity.  It can feel sometimes as though inner experience itself is being invalidated, as though only our externally visible and attestable actions had any worth.
Perhaps this explains why we're encouraged to think of depression as an inconvenient obstacle to be dodged past, perhaps with the aid of a few positive thinking exercises and a pill, and why we imagine that a lunchtime mindfulness session squeezed between meetings will remedy our feelings of exhaustion. Rather than sit with what might be ailing us, give some rein to our curiosity about our states of mind, we demand of ourselves and others that we stop navel-gazing and get back to work as quickly as possible. Non-work is a temporary aberration to be got over, not a meaningful dimension of our lives".

Two excellent paragraphs that immediately convinced me to buy and download the book which so far is as eloquent and engaging as the above. Fewer than 30 pages in, and the author has already tackled Freud, Weber, Hesiod, Oscar Wilde, Socrates, and Garfield. 

Oscar Wilde
(the cartoon cat, not the obscure American president).

It's going to be a cracker.

So what are you (not) doing this weekend?






Related posts

The No-Day Working Week
Work, Monotony, and Happiness
A Case of the Mondays
On staring out the window


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