It did not happen in a single decision. It happened through about four hundred reasonable ones, each defensible on its own evening. Now the weekend is a buffer for the week, your friends are people you were once close to, and the first thing you do at a red light is check whether anything has arrived.
The books people recommend for this are usually productivity books, which is like treating a flood with a better pump. These three attack the premise instead. They are short, and two of them are older than the problem, which is part of why they can still see it.
Josef Pieper · 1948
Written in the rubble of postwar Germany, two lectures long, by a philosopher whose claim is that a culture able to justify rest only as recovery for more work has already lost something it can no longer name. A hundred pages. It refuses the compromise you were hoping to make, which is what makes it uncomfortable in the useful direction.
Herman Melville · 1853
A clerk in a Wall Street office begins answering every request with the same five words, I would prefer not to, and the story never once explains him. Read in an evening. It has sat in the middle of American literature for a hundred and seventy years holding the position that an office is a strange place to give a life to.
Wendell Berry · 1987
Poems made on Sunday walks in the woods above his farm, over many years, deliberately written outside the working week. Pieper argues the case. Berry does not argue anything, he just shows you an hour of the other kind from inside it. Keep the book somewhere you will catch sight of it on a Saturday morning.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
