« One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinised? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to ‘relax’. This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinisation of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the work. he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. Without discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.
In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism [we have] become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by [ourselves]. There is an increasing tendency to […] make undisciplined, lazy indulgence in the rest of one’s life the counterpart and balance for the routinised way of life imposed on us during the eight hours of work. To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities […], are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss. »
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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