the chief end of man...*

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for satisfaction of his materials needs.

~ Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the words of the English historian E. P. Thompson, time became “currency: it is not passed but spent.” As employers consolidated control over their workforces, the day was increasingly split into two kinds of time: “owners’ time, the time of work”; and “their own time, a time (in theory) for leisure.’ Eventually, workers came to perceive time, not as the milieu in which they lived their life, but ‘as an objective force within which [they] were imprisoned.'”

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

(The source of the last passage should be fairly self-evident. And in case there is any confusion, it is not from Philip Pullman's Golden Compass)


*and a different sort of iron cage.