The twenty-first century is such a tough time to be alive.

A piece by Drake Baer in Fast Company entitled Slacking At Work Is A Controversial Productivity Tool–So Is There A Better Way? opens with this sentence:

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace,” Tony Schwartz recently wrote in The New York Times.

“Overwhelming demands.” “Unsustainable pace.”

Shut up.

We could be living through World War II right now. The fear of invasion. The loss of so many American lives. The almost complete transformation of our peacetime economy to a wartime economy. The rationing of food, fuel and metal for the war effort.

Or the Great Depression. Crippling unemployment. The bread lines. Homelessness on a national scale. The Dust Bowl. Hoovervilles. The constant fear of starvation.

Or how about the eighteenth century? A time when Americans had to grow their own food, make their own clothing, build their own homes and store enough firewood to survive the harsh New England winter. It was an age that lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, insulation, basic communication, the combustion engine and antibiotics.

How about the Civil War? Or Vietnam?  

Why not spend a day imagining what it was like to be an African American on a slave plantation in the deep south prior to Emancipation. 

Overwhelming demands. Unsustainable pace.

Seriously. Shut the hell up.