“We are materially richer than ever before…And yet we are ontologically queasy.”
- Charles Foster
Hustle culture is the pinnacle of what I call a checklist existence, the ultimate form of a world in which every box we tick gets replaced by yet another one, the same way that e-mail inboxes are the ever-regenerating many-headed hydras that plague our daily lives.
We slay them endlessly, hoping that each slash of the delete key or reply button will get us closer to that mythic allure of “inbox zero,” a profoundly dystopian goal.
In that never-ending battle, which we always lose, the checklist itself becomes the achievement, an utterly bizarre, tragicomic approach to living—and yet one that, like most of us, I struggle to resist.
We are, too often, chained to our checklists, inmates held inside our own inboxes.
- Brian Klaus
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-red-queen-fallacy