This article speaks to the guilt I often feel if my day has been less than productive, that many of the people I know are forced to retire early due to over-work, the fact that I have spent considerable time perfecting 'tasks', that I have tried multitudes of task list software and that it's seemingly impossible in Taiwan to experience silence and peace.

We love nothing more than to conflate 'work' with 'calling,' to confuse busyness with purpose. Stillness is suspicious! Work is all there is! Endless toil isn't just a means to divinity, it is divinity! It says so in the Bible! So it must be true."

Ain't it a shame? Don't ideas like microtasking speak directly to the toxic, Puritanical American work ethic that tells us if you're not spending pretty much every waking moment in some manner of chore, well, your value as a human is more than a little bit diminished? Is it not the idea that a given month, week, day or hour is nothing more than a giant, blank To Do list in need of a some items?

Yes, we're Americans. We are, by and large, utterly terrified of silence, stillness, spaciousness, the doing of nothing so as to feel the totality of everything. Meditation, for most, is disquieting and strange. Deep quiet feels weird and dangerous, a void aching to be filled. The Internet has us convinced that the world is a roaring fire hose of urgent information, and if you can't swallow it all, well, something must be wrong with you.

It is no longer possible to sit quietly on the park bench without checking your Facebook feed, chatting with Siri and waving to the CCTV cameras. It is no longer possible to be astonished at the wonder of your footfalls along the forest path and not feel the urge to check email, find the nearest Starbucks, Hipstamatic the hell out of that beautiful fallen tree. You cannot just sit in your car along a quiet country road without the GPS beeping that you took a wrong turn as OnStar politely blows up your car.

From Hurry up, get more done, and die