Living in Expectation of the Unexpected Gift

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more

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. The idea of total work was inspired by the German philosopher Josef Pieper, who first wrote about it in his book Leisure, The Basis of Culture. Writing in Germany after World War II, Pieper was

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What is attention for? Attention is taken up as a capacity that is being diminished by our technological environment with the emphasis falling on digitally induced states of distraction. But what are we distracted from? If our attention were more robust or better ordered, to what would we give it? Pascal had an answer, and Weil did, too, it seems t... See more