Josh Cohen > Quotes

“Privacy, precisely because it ensures that we are never fully known to others, provides a shelter for imaginative freedom, curiosity and self-reflection.”
― Josh Cohen

“If the constraints of sheer survival are loosened, we can stop not because we're too frightened to move or too exhausted from doing too much, but to discover what it is we might want to do and who we might want to be.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“We dislike labour because it makes us experience the day on terms that are not our own.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“We find ourselves suspended between a compulsion to do too much and a wish to do nothing.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Being is the essential antidote to the non-stop inertia of doing, a way of resisting the gravity that drags us downwards.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“The exhaustion of burnout leads to an intense yearning for a state of rest alongside the sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction that won't let them go.”
― Josh Cohen

“The manic productivity of capitalism, the demands and aspirations of social status and the mechanical rhythms of industrialism all corral the individual into a perpetual state of anxious and compliant activity.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Part of the problem is that we’re trapped inside our own heads, unable to see ourselves from the outside. This accounts for why we’re so much more adept at pointing out the habitual mistakes of others than our own. Here, fiction can help in ways real-life experience usually can’t. What the best fiction does—which is also, hopefully, what the psychoanalyst would do—is help us to experience the same errors and illusions from the inside rather than to view them from on high, to enter the world of the person who made them for long enough to understand why.”
― Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature

“I saw instead only chance to spend most of my days reading. And there are few more crystalline images of withdrawal from the world of action and purpose than a person reading.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working, Why We Have to Stop

“What if, instead of searching vainly for an elusive entity ahead of us, we stopped at something in front of us, and rested, and listened?”
― Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature

“So invested is our manically productive culture in the image of us as active and purposeful beings that we seek to erase or destroy all evidence to the contrary — the slacker must put on a suit, get a job, lose his benefits and make himself useful. Harmlessly ineffective as he may be, we hate and fear him for showing us the useless dimension of our own selfhood, for voicing our own impulse not to go to work today, or tomorrow.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“The elevation of the Sabbath to sacred status hints to us that being is a higher mode of existence than doing.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Take a day at the shopping centre, sold to us as an invigorating break from the rigours of work. Does it not feel more like an extension of it, blurring the line between work and 'free' time?”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“Not working has almost always been valued only to the extent that it serves the cause of work. It is time we spoke up for not working, in all its creative possibilities, as its own value.”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working

“But is it not equally true that we create worlds that don't exist because the world that does exist is so perpetually painful and disappointing?”
― Josh Cohen, Not Working, Why We Have to Stop