I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
What emotions would we experience if we weren't working ourselves to death? What wishes drive us? What fantasies hitch themselves to our continual busyness? Only when we step away from our frenzy can we know.
Interpretation
The quote encourages reflection on the feelings and desires that underpin our relentless pursuit of busyness.
Arlie Russell Hochschild's quote prompts us to consider the emotional toll of our constant endeavors and the deeper wishes and fantasies that propel us into a state of perpetual busyness. It suggests that true understanding of our true emotions and aspirations can only emerge when we take a break from this frantic pace, allowing for introspection and clarity.
In practice
During a wellness seminar, one could quote this to emphasize the importance of taking time for self-reflection.
I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn't get done.
At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.
The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.
But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.
In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
What I know for sure is that pleasure is energy reciprocated. What you put out comes back. Your base level of pleasure is determined by how you view your whole life.
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