"**The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea in the first place**. Workers got up with the sun and slept at dusk, the lengths of their days varying with the seasons. There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvesttime, and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that—for example, by doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner—would rightly have been considered a lunatic. "**There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite**: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, **so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion**." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[work-life-balance]], [[infinite-scroll]], [[ever-present-now]], [[character]], [[discipline]], [[routines]], [[environmental-design]] **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]