First off, it seems to me that, from a social and personal well being perspective, we work too much. If we take an evolutionary perspective, ants work continually, because they are best viewed as little machines. More developed animals, the mammals, like chimps and lions and seals, have lots and lots of time for relaxation. So too did and to some very limited extent do, hunter-gatherers. I read somewhere their average “work week” is perhaps 20 hours. The rest of the time they can spend telling stories, playing games or music, fucking, and just laying around. The sense of time constraint implied by our modern concept of laziness is simply inconsistent with our recent past, and has come about only in perhaps the past 2-4 thousand years.
Secondly, because I am not opposed to the new, to development, to visions of a greater humanity, I will say that we can and should aspire to higher levels of productivity, but that we need to balance creative mania, with some grounding in our nature.
And what is our nature? I would say it is creative, but not relentlessly so. We need breaks. The alternative is addiction, and addiction by definition is contrary to spiritual development.
And what blocks creativity? Fear. Fear of all the sundry emotions which we have blocked out, away from conscious awareness. To be truly creative one must be open, and to be open is to invite everything.
Practically, what seems to happen is we find and build grooves, tracks, simple things we do over and over in roughly the same way which meet the task of getting us fed, clothed, and sheltered, but which do not really arise from creative places, and which on the contrary feel confining.
It is tempting to wonder if we fear Great Time, within which are the realities we fear, most notably death and dissolution, but also separation, failure, and inconstancy.
Well, I myself have things to do, but thought I would throw a few thoughts out there.