A review by s_mavin
Not Working: Why We Have to Stop by Josh Cohen
4.0
I liked Josh Cohen’s way of writing. What’s great about this book is that it isn’t prescriptive. It doesn’t give you a list of things to change about your life. What it does is puts forth ideas to mull over - it takes on ideas from Freud, Oscar Wilde, Hannah Arendt, Thoreau, Melville, etc to ask you to consider our relationship with being and doing. I like books that end in questions and not in over simplified answers.
Here are a few quotes/ideas I liked (the ones I remembered to note/highlight/copy. There are several other gems peppered in) -
“The desire for non-desire.”
“The state of doing nothing while doing everything.”
“Being is the essential antidote to the non stop inertia of doing, a way of resisting the gravity that drags us downwards.”
“The idea of UBI (Universal basic income) is promising because it points us beyond a technocratic solution to specific problems of job scarcity and automation, and asks us to address more essential questions : what is a human being? What is the human life for? - questions a blindly overworked life never has the chance to stop and think about.”
Here are a few quotes/ideas I liked (the ones I remembered to note/highlight/copy. There are several other gems peppered in) -
“The desire for non-desire.”
“The state of doing nothing while doing everything.”
“Being is the essential antidote to the non stop inertia of doing, a way of resisting the gravity that drags us downwards.”
“The idea of UBI (Universal basic income) is promising because it points us beyond a technocratic solution to specific problems of job scarcity and automation, and asks us to address more essential questions : what is a human being? What is the human life for? - questions a blindly overworked life never has the chance to stop and think about.”