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Quote by Scott C. Holstad

“When I turned 15, my father let me drive our old ’66 Chevy Impala and I was finally able to get a “real” job – at a fast-food restaurant. Where else at that age? I never stopped working. For most of my life, I worked a good 15-20 hours a day, for years, and I made the mistake of thinking I was damn near invincible, only to eventually find out I wasn’t.”

Quote by Scott C. Holstad

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Scott C. Holstad

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“Zee had only grinned at me when I was valuable to her. I'd go on to tangle with other bosses and authority figures, and that dynamic never changed. Affection never outlasted need. This was the first lesson the city taught me the hard way. The vast majority of us are merely pawns in someone else's game. Don't get defensive over this point. Embrace it. Once you do, you can begin to manipulate the board. Positioned correctly, pawns can checkmate kings.”

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Book:My Government Means to Kill Me
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“I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back. But once I become genuinely engaged in a project, I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative. As a teacher, I edit my students’ writing with a nit-picking precision and big-picture ambition they may likely never experience again. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels. It’s no coincidence that so many social movements arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them. ("It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam", The New York Times)”

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“Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principle cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.... Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth.”

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Book:The Right To Be Lazy
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“We labor not to accomplish some task, for that is far too simple. We labor so that a child is a bit safer, a hunger satisfied, a house warmed, poverty brought to its knees, a dream brought to reality, a wound healed, a need met in whatever way that need is met. We labor to leave those for whom we have labored enriched in ways that could not have been possible were it not for our labor. Therefore, we would be wise to remember that it is in the sweat of our labors that we have the privilege of leaving the imprint of our legacies.”

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Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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