I don’t believe in hard work.
*Gasp!* How anti-American! How sexy, how beatnik, how totally rebellious. But I don’t mean it in a rebellious sort of way. In fact, I do believe in a lot of other things. I believe in attention, I believe in focus, I believe in fascination, and cultivated awareness and consciousness and presence. I believe in flow. But here is what I do not believe in: I do not believe in self-flagellation, or noses to grindstones. Poor noses! I do not believe in making yourself do something against your own will. What is that, anyway? It undermines your self-esteem and makes you feel powerless. Worse, I think that we have developed this idea in our collective psyche that “moar werk = bettar”. All that stuff out there, all that stuff we want, if we deserved it we would already have it, so maybe if we work really really hard, we’ll deserve it. Guess what — doing something that you don’t want to do is a lot of freakin’ work! And then amazingly, we find that foom, our lives are a whole lot work and struggle. It’s difficult to admit it, but we totally asked for it.
—Princess Butterfly, Work Schmirk
