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Not Working

Why We Have to Stop

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Not Working

By: Josh Cohen
Narrated by: Jonathan Coote, Josh Cohen
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About this listen

'To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.' (Oscar Wilde)

More than ever before, we live in a culture that excoriates inactivity and demonizes idleness. Work, connectivity and a constant flow of information are the cultural norms, and a permanent busyness pervades even our quietest moments. Little wonder so many of us are burning out. In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of imaginative freedom and creativity.

Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity and considers four faces of inertia - the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer and the slacker. Drawing on his personal experiences and on stories from his consulting room, while punctuating his discussions with portraits of figures associated with the different forms of inactivity - Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace - Cohen gets to the heart of the apathy so many of us feel when faced with the demands of contemporary life and asks how we might live a different and more fulfilled existence.

©2016 Josh Cohen (P)2018 Audible, Ltd Philosophy

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I must admit though, while reading this book I spilled into a temporal depression because, I noticed a lot of similarities between myself and some characters mentioned, I believe anyone who wants to read this book must have some level of mental strength or at least be properly guided so they don't misunderstand the concept of the book. This is a book which tries to teach us the need for rest, that is, to pause every once in a while to avoid a sudden breakdown in our work life, and also for us to clearly define our motivation for doing whatever it is that we do, in simple terms, to find joy in what we do.

Wow! This was really eye opening

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Absolute nonsense. I did get some interesting biographies of Orsen Welles, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace. The rest is pretentious nonsense.

Useless

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I guess it is ironic that with a book about time-stress and making the most out of ones time, that I found this a bit of a tedious, pompous waste of 5 hours. If you like an English-Literature A-level student chewing your ear off about the meanings of characters in a novel, and what the novel is *really* trying to say, then you might like this.

The central tenet of the book - that we all rush around working too hard, and that there is more to life - has obvious merit but could have been said in 4 pages.

I do wonder if the author intentionally made the book so long as to deliberately take up so much of the readers’ / listeners’ time as to question the value of those hours. But I rather suspect he just likes the sound of his own pen.

Ok -ish but not worth the time

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