If presence is the ability to inhabit what’s happening, overwork often becomes a socially approved way of vanishing. The schedule fills up, the mind races ahead, and even when the body is at the dinner table or on vacation, attention remains trapped in emails, metrics, and unfinished tasks. In that sense, productivity can turn into a lifestyle of partial absence.
This dynamic echoes Hannah Arendt’s idea in *The Human Condition* (1958) that relentless “labor” can crowd out deeper forms of human experience. Building on Ross’s point, the danger is not work itself, but the way constant busyness can replace the felt experience of being alive. [...]
