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hours increase, our mental well-being and physical health decrease.
    The human brain is unique in the animal kingdom for its ability to come up with novel solutions to problems. Animals, especially non-human primates, are certainly creative. However, they are only creative within the narrow limits of their own cognitive and perceptual worlds. Humans have invented technology to extend our perception to invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and soon we may even be able to extend our memory and cognition using neurotechnology. Many neuroscientists argue that humans are unique in the degree to which we are conscious. Humans are the only species that have created a communication system that allows us to create art and acquire complex bodies of knowledge.
    We are now using our brains to try to understand our brains. Another unique thing about humans is that we can afford to be lazy because of our technology and culture. We might think that an elephant seal lounging around on a California beach is being lazy. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The seal is preserving precious body fat and energy for when he has to hunt in frigid water or avoid sharks.
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    How did we become convinced that idleness is evil? Idleness has always been feared in the United States. The Puritans believed that hard work was the only way to serve God. Going back to 16th-century Europe where Puritanism has its roots, Luther and Calvin both believed that constant work was ordained by God and they commanded each person to choose a job and work at it “as a century post so that he may not heedlessly wander about.” Forced labor was even encouraged for the poor and unemployed as a way to keep them on “the path of righteous living.” During Luther’s lifetime, Europe was urbanizing and its population expanding rapidly. This led to overcrowded cities, high unemployment, and inflation. There was an explosion in the number of urban poor in places like London, Venice, and Amsterdam. Unable to grasp macroeconomics, zealots like Luther saw the new urban poor masses as “indifferent idlers” who should be punished with toil for their original sin of laziness.
    We can trace the roots of our current obsession with work and effectiveness to Luther’s misperception that poverty is caused by laziness rather than complex socio-economic circumstances. 3 Idleness came to be seen as an evil. If only Luther had been trained as a sociologist, we might have more than two weeks of vacation every year.
    The consequences of Luther’s rabid anti-idleness philosophy, especially in the United States, are seen in our absurdly short vacations and our compulsive work ethic. (Not that the United States is alone in this obsession; the Japanese have even coined the term “karoshi,” which means “death from overwork.”)
    The increase in working hours is also striking given the recent explosion of time management, “get-everything-done-right-now” books and seminars on the market. On Amazon, I counted over ninety-five thousand books on time management. You would need to be very skilled at time management to read all of the time management books on Amazon. Assuming the average length of a book is two hundred pages, that’s nineteen million pages of time management material to read. You would have to read about three time management books a day for seventy-two years to get through them all.
    If these books are really effective at making us more effective, then why are we working more hours? Why does study after study show that we are more stressed, have worse family relationships, weigh more, and are less happy because we are working too much? Does it seem odd that as the time management industry sells more books, the number of hours we work increases? To quote Bertrand Russell, “can anything more insane be imagined?”
    Could it be that we just aren’t getting the message? Do we need even more