Americans' "breathless haste in working--the true vice of the new world--is already starting to spread to old Europe, making it savage and covering it with a most odd mindlessness. Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages--one lives like someone who might always 'miss out on something.' 'Rather do anything than nothing'--even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste....
"For life in a hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else....
"More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a 'need to recuperate' and is starting to be ashamed of itself. 'One owes it to one's health'--that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside."
--The Gay Science, sec. 329. (This was written more than 120 years ago.)
UPDATE: A student from Boston University has pointed out to me another, complementary passage from the same book:
How often I see that blindly raging industriousness does
create wealth and reap honors while at the same time depriving
the organs of their subtlety, which alone would make possible
the enjoyment of wealth and honors; also that this chief
antidote to boredom and the passions at the same time blunts
the senses and leads the spirit to resist new attractions.
(The most industriousness of all ages--ours--does not know how
to make anything of all its industriousness and money, except
always still more money and still more industriousness; for it
requires more genius to spend than to acquire. --Well, we
shall have our "grandchildren!")
The Gay Science, sec. 21
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