Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.

— Robert L. Stevenson,
An Apology for Idlers

We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. We are members of the cult of efficiency, and we’re killing ourselves with productivity.

[T]echnology didn’t create this cult; it simply added to an existing culture. For generations, we have made ourselves miserable while we’ve worked feverishly. We have driven ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten where we are going, and have lost our capacity for “light-heartedness and play.”

Here’s the bottom line: We are lonely, sick, and suicidal. Every year a new survey emerges showing more people are isolated and depressed than the year before. It’s time to stop watching the trend move in the wrong direction while we throw up our hands in despair. It’s time to figure out what’s going wrong.

— Celeste Headlee, DO NOTHING: How To Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving (intro)

… we’ve lost sight of the fact that productivity is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself. One time-use expert told Juliet Schor, “We have become walking résumés. If you’re not doing something, you’re not creating and defining who you are.”

In many ways, I think we’ve lost sight of the purpose of free time. We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness, but those two things are very different. Leisure is not a synonym for inactive. Idleness offers an opportunity for play, something people rarely indulge in these days.

— Celeste Headlee,
Do Nothing (chapter 5)

Do Nothing: How To Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

The quest for achieving peak productivity is now akin to a religion, one consisting of high priests (time management gurus, life hack specialists, productivity coaches, headlining management professionals), various teachings (apps, tools, approaches, methods, reminders, workstation re-designs, forms of discipline), and millions of willing aspirants (early adopters, workshop participants, testifiers, devotees). A search for “how to be more productive” yields, at present count, 40,900,000 results.

— Andrew Taggart,
Life hacks are part of a 200-year-old movement to destroy your humanity

What remains deeply puzzling about the obsession with personal productivity is that it is a rather uninteresting goal. Isn’t peak productivity an oddly deflating cultural ideal, especially when put in comparison with Achilles’ heroic feats, Solon’s excellence in statecraft, St. Thomas Aquinas’s holiness, Beethoven’s beautiful symphonies, and G.I. Gurdjieff’s spiritual search? How did it become such an ideal for us to aspire to?

A more fundamental question than how we can “hack” our productivity is why we place so much importance on doing so in the first place.

— Andrew Taggart

… we’ve taken the bourgeois virtue of hard work, or productivity, and applied it to ourselves with ruthless persistence.

… as progeny of the Bourgeois Revaluation, we, unlike aristocrats, have no wars to fight, honors to defend, courts to attend, leisurely hunts to go on, or liberal arts to pursue. Nor, unlike devout Christians of the medieval period, do we have inner spiritual struggles over which we can rend our souls. Rather, in the work society we have small betterments to make, tasks to complete, daily problems to solve, minor burdens to carry, modest marks to leave on the world before our time has come. Given this background, it makes some sense to throw ourselves into how we could improve on our bettering, especially our self-bettering.

— Andrew Taggart

… the work society actually requires productive bodies, and thus it uses us, somewhat akin to the way that natural selection does, to reproduce itself. Our self-internalization of productivity, as Foucault noted with regard to self-discipline, is more effective than having it wrought upon us by others.

We adopt the illusion that personal productivity is itself the end of suffering, or is itself happiness, or is at least what affords us the chance to be happy when, in actuality, the aim of personal productivity is to enable the work society to persist in its existence. Just as, according to Robert Wright in his book Why Buddhism is True, “Natural selection doesn’t ‘want us’ to be happy” but rather to “be productive, in its narrow sense of productive,” so the work society doesn’t want us to be happy but instead to be more productive in its sense of the term. The truth is that we are its tools.

— Andrew Taggart

Strong ages, noble cultures, all consider pity, ‘neighbor-love,’ and the lack of self and self-assurance as something contemptible. Ages must be measured by their positive strength — and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modesty, legality, and scientism — accumulating, economic, machinelike — appear as a weak age. Our virtues are conditional on, are provoked by, our weaknesses. ‘Equality’ as a certain factual increase in similarity, which merely finds expression in the theory of ‘equal rights,’ is an essential feature of decline. The cleavage between man and man, status and status, the plurality of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out — what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every strong age. The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 37)

In our society ... work is defined as the act by which an employee contracts out her or his labour power as property in the person to an employer for fair monetary compensation. This way of describing work, of understanding it as a fair exchange between two equals, hides the real relationship between employer and employee: that of domination and subordination. For if the truth behind the employment contract were widely known, workers in our society would refuse to work, because they would see that it is impossible for human individuals to truly separate out labour power from themselves. “Property in the person” doesn’t really exist as something that an individual can simply sell as a separate thing. Machinists cannot just detach from themselves the specific skills needed by an employer; those skills are part of an organic whole that cannot be disengaged from the entire person; similarly, sex appeal is an intrinsic part of exotic dancers, and it is incomprehensible how such a constitutive, intangible characteristic could be severed from the dancers themselves. A dancer has to be totally present in order to dance, just like a machinist must be totally present in order to work; neither can just send their discrete skills to do the work for them. Whether machinist, dancer, teacher, secretary, or pharmacist, it is not only one’s skills that are being sold to an employer, it is also one’s very being. When employees contract out their labour power as property in the person to employers, what is really happening is that employees are selling their own self determination, their own wills, their own freedom. In short, they are, during their hours of employment, slaves.

— L. Susan Brown,
Does Work Really Work?

What is a slave? A slave is commonly regarded as a person who is the legal property of another and is bound to absolute obedience. The legal lie that is created when we speak of a worker’s capacity to sell property in the person without alienating her or his will allows us to maintain the false distinction between a worker and a slave. A worker must work according to the will of another. A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job. The control the employer has over the employee at work is absolute. There is, in the end, no negotiation — you do it the boss’ way or you hit the highway. It is ludicrous to believe that it is possible to separate out and sell “property in the person” while maintaining human integrity. To sell one’s labour power on the market is to enter into a relationship of subordination with one’s employer — it is to become a slave to the employer/master. The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day, and slaves know that they are slaves, while most workers do not think of themselves in such terms.

— L. Susan Brown,
Does Work Really Work?

Who first invented work, and bound the free

And holiday-rejoicing spirit down

To the ever-haunting importunity

Of business in the green fields, and the town—

To plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! most sad

To that dry drudgery at the—desk's dead wood?

Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,

Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad

Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,

That round and round incalculably reel—

For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—

In that red realm from which are no returnings:

Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye

He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day.

— Charles Lamb, Work

It is interesting to note that this quote is from ~2 centuries ago

some of the other quotes shared here are also similarly old or older, a few (like this) even dating back to antiquity

Anti-work sentiments are therefore not really new...

They talk of time, and of time's galling yoke,

That like a mill-stone on man's mind doth press,

Which only works and business can redress:

Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,

Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.

But might I, fed with silent meditation,

Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation—

Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke—

I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit:

Fling in more days than went to make the gem

That crown'd the white top of Methusalem:

Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,

Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,

The heaven-sweet burden of eternity.

— Charles Lamb, Leisure

We Surrealists have never relented in our abhorrence of the State-Work-Religion trinity, an abhorrence that has often brought us into the company of the comrades from the Anarchist Federation ...

from the preliminary declaration of the anarchist Surrealists (by André Breton, Benjamin Péret et al.) in Le Libertaire

“And after this, let no one speak to me of work — I mean the moral value of work. I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity, and in this regard I strongly favor its better, that is its fairer, division. I admit that life's grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men. I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks by daylight. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning — that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself — is not earned by work.”

— André Breton, Nadja (plate 17)

“Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them.”

— Max Barry, Company (Q4/1)

Unless we abandon the work ethic of another era, … lives may still be wasted because of our blind insistence that everyone must have a “job” even if the job is useless.

— Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority (II. §3)

The Smug Minority by Pierre Berton

[of the last man]

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra (prologue)

And ye also, to whom life is rough labour and disquiet, are ye not very tired of life? Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death?

All ye to whom rough labour is dear, and the rapid, new, and strange—ye put up with yourselves badly; your diligence is flight, and the will to self-forgetfulness.

If ye believed more in life, then would ye devote yourselves less to the momentary. But for waiting, ye have not enough of capacity in you—nor even for idling!

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra (chapter 9)