Can we take a fucking break?
Stress, stress, stress. Productivity, productivity, productivity.
I think a big reason many adults are unhappy is that life offers hardly any breaks once you reach this stage. It’s like the moment you leave school, someone slaps a permanent “ON” switch on your back and you’re not allowed to turn it off. Ever.
ON-ON-ON-ON-ON-ON-ON IT GOES.
The big machine of capitalism demands: produce, produce, produce, or perish. And we oblige—zombies on a never-ending treadmill. Hobbies? Turn them into side hustles. Weekends? Chore marathons. Sick leave? Be ready to fight for it—or risk your job. Vacations? Rare luxuries. Or you scramble to fill them with errands and “useful” activities because, apparently, existing in stillness is a crime.
I remember the first time I realized the breakless nature of “grown-up life.” I was looking around and thought: when does the next summer holiday start? But it never came.
It’s like those days at school when you had an eternity of free time, or at least a chunk of summer to breathe in. Now? Your “holiday” is just a precarious window where you switch from your primary hustle to the secondary hustle of chores, all the mundane stuff you can't do on workdays. And then Monday hits, slapping you back into the hamster wheel. If you’re lucky, you can pay the bills on time and get some groceries in the fridge while you’re at it.
It’s exhausting. It’s soul-sucking. And it’s—let’s be honest—unnecessary. Because if you look at it from a distance, the machine grinds without much purpose. We’re piling up meaningless tasks to keep the big corporate behemoth alive while we ourselves fade into numbness.
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,”
Camus once wrote about Sisyphus. But these days, all I see are people with hearts drained by endless drudgery, no breaks in sight.
Sisyphus was cursed, and his curse is ours.
I love me an absurdist attitude toward life, but in this rare instance Camus was wrong.
I think back to a close friend—22 at the time—who told me he’d been working for a solid year without pause, eyes hollow, voice cracking. That first taste of the “adult world,” biting down hard on him. I was still at university at this time and thought, “Eh, it can’t be so bad, can it?” I was a dumbass.
Another friend who became sick and had the audacity to take a couple weeks off—then had to jump from one toxic job to another for the sake of scheduling flexibility to accommodate her disease. Or the folks who say, “I have a 4-day workweek, but it’s still endless chores and bills and side hustles.” Even one day less of “official” labor doesn’t rescue us from our internal compulsion to stay “productive.” Because the overlords are still there, breathing down our necks, whether through the job, the rent, the mortgage, or the healthcare system.
We all just want to rest. To be bored again, freely bored—like when you’re a kid staring at clouds, or reading weird existential fiction for an entire afternoon with zero guilt (that’s me), or just lying in bed, eyes closed, letting your thoughts drift. But in this capitalist machine, we’re told that being bored or idle is akin to sin. So we shuffle on, burdened by loans, toxic bosses, grocery lists, rent hikes, the fear of being left behind.
It’s strange how most of Europe has laws guaranteeing more time off, or at least some semblance of a break from the daily grind. Yet even here, the breaks are rationed, like some precious commodity. In many places (especially the US), they don’t even pretend to offer real time off (I feel for you, my American friends). We’ve normalized mania, accepted it as “just life.” But let’s not forget: it doesn’t have to be. It’s this system that’s the problem, not the concept of adulthood itself. A truly supportive society would recognize the need for genuine rest—days, weeks, maybe months of stepping away from the hamster wheel to realign, reconnect with ourselves, and just exist.
Instead, we keep pushing. And that’s why adults are unhappy—life simply doesn’t pause anymore, except for the rich and powerful, who slip away to their villas or retreats, recharging while the rest keep the engines warm. The moment we’re done with one task, another urgent one pops up like a glitch in the matrix.
We’re never caught up. We never get time. And that robs us of our capacity to feel, to think, to heal.
As Franz Kafka once wrote,
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
But we lose that capacity fast when we’re beaten down by a system that refuses to let us catch our breath. So maybe it’s time to demand more than just a couple days of “structured” leave. Maybe it’s time to break this wheel, sabotage the machine that thrives on our exhaustion. (For legal reasons, I do not endorse violence.)
It’s a me! Luigi!
Because the older we get, the deeper we sink into this pit of non-stop “lifing.” And I believe most of us—myself included—are desperate for just one real break, a chance to reset the clock, and remember what it’s like to just live.
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Thanks for reading and stay productive ha ha haha ha ha,
Antonio Melonio
The essay in video format:
All of this untold human misery perpetuated all so the plutocrats can look at their screens and see the line go up forever and ever beyond all meaning. Bring on the collapse, humanity needs to be rebooted, we let the corporate elite sociopaths destroy our humanity in the name of profits, its obscene.
I agree, like hamsters, we keep running around and around to get nowhere. We suffer from the illusion that the faster we go through life, the bigger the prize at the end. Sadly, no matter how fast we go, death is the prize for everyone. I thought I would have a good rest when I retired. That was a fool's dream. I am busier than ever. Do they still have a siesta In the middle of the day in Italy? If I move there, will I be able to rest?