“I consider this my greatest success: my life hasn’t been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.”

Emil Cioran

After the Industrial Revolution, work stopped being merely something one did to avoid hunger and became a test of character. Following two world wars, it was credited with rebuilding nations, restoring prosperity and keeping society respectable. The hardworking citizen was therefore not simply earning a living, but apparently holding civilisation together before lunch.

By the twentieth century, governments, businesses and churches had promoted work into a moral virtue, civic duty and personal identity. People became what they did, usually for the benefit of the rich, who coincidentally were people who seemed to do rather less of it.

Institutions continued to praise family life, naturally, while arranging working hours that made a quality family life largely theoretical and unobtainable.

Cioran regarded all this enthusiasm with suspicion. Work might be economically necessary, he argued, but its glorification served a darker purpose: it kept people too busy to ask what life was actually for.

Sometimes, you gotta say fuck it, quit your dumb job and go ponder the meaning of your life and figure out what you really want to do with it.

(I will not elaborate)

Light Yagami - Oops...I Did It Again

L Lawliet - ...Baby One More Time

Mello - I'm a Slave 4 U

Near - Gimme More

Amane Misa - Circus

Takada Kiyomi - Toxic

Mikami Teru - (You Drive Me) Crazy

Rem - If You Seek Amy

Ryuk - Work Bitch

Aizawa Shuuichi - Womanizer