The totalization of production leads to the total profanation of life. Rest, too, is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time. It is no longer the beginning of a holy period of assembly. The mounting pressure to perform makes even recreational pauses impossible. Thus, many people find that they fall ill during leisure time. This illness has even been given a name: leisure sickness.

- Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

A clown at a lunch counter in a diner, Reno, Nevada, 1963

Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

— Emil Cioran

Grozny, 1995

I sensed a mutual indifference behind polite smiles and had the overwhelming impression that, more and more frequently, I was watching people who didn’t really know why they were living.

- Krzysztof Kieślowski

Susanne Kuhnke at Documenta 7 in the Fridericianum, Germany, 1982.

I’d always worried about being practically empty, about having no serious reason for living. And now, confronted with the facts, I was sure of my individual nullity. In that environment, I seem to have disintegrated, I felt very close to nonexistence. I discovered that with no one to speak to me of familiar things, there was nothing to stop me from sinking into irresistible boredom, a terrifying, sickly sweet torpor. Nauseating.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Journey to the End of the Night

A soldier in Vietnam shotgunning cannabis from the barrel of a gun

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

Pessoa's last words, written shortly before his death (1935)