“Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavour, to imagine that you can fulfil yourself through assiduous labour—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivialises, and depersonalises.
Work displaces man’s centre of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorisation, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality."
--Emil Cioran
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