"**As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere**—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence. "Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when the activities with which we fill our leisure hours increasingly come to resemble not merely work but sometimes, as in the case of a SoulCycle class or a CrossFit workout, actual physical punishment—**the self-flagellation of guilty sinners anxious to expunge the stain of laziness before it’s too late**." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[progressing-slowly]], [[routines]], [[work-life-balance]], [[discipline]], [[character]], [[resting]], **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]