—Rainer M. Rilke Rilke was a sensitive person ill-suited to his times. The years following the turn of the 20th century in Europe saw the brutal birth of the modern industrial economy and the horrors of World War I. This period also saw the increasing obsession on the part of the capitalist class with measuring time and maximizing worker efficiency. And there are the first hints of the nascent time management industry beginning to wrap its tentacles around the culture. Clocks in offices, factories, and homes were becoming widespread for the first time. Human workers began to be thought of as machines in a system designed to produce profit for the owners of the economy. Against this backdrop, the sensitive and introspective Rilke sacrificed romantic love, his family, and material comforts in order to pursue his art. Rilke knew that spending time doing nothing was extremely important for his creative process. He aspired to be idle with joy—which to our over-worked and over-scheduled 21st-century ears sounds shocking.
