25% of Irish people check work emails while on holidays. 49% of Irish people between 25 and 34 check social media overnight if they can’t sleep.
Irish Times, Signs of the Times Survey 2019, April 27, 2019.
What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.
Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily
When I was young, here in the US we thought a business being open from 7am to 11pm was amazing. Now 24/7 is everywhere and I think our cultural exhaustion is beginning to show. However, “Keep up or die” is a national motto that itself is killing us. Joan’s ultimatum to herself (“make time or die”) is a better choice. Thanks for posting.