Juliet Schor

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The confession I almost cut from this book was the one about the transatlantic flight.

You know the one. I wrote 187 pages in a single sitting. I recognized, somewhere over the Atlantic, that the exhilaration had drained away hours earlier. That what remained was grinding compulsion. That I had confused productivity with aliveness. And I kept typing.

I kept that confession in because honesty demanded it. But I never fully understood what it meant until I spent time inside Juliet Schor's framework. She gave me the diagnosis I could not give myself.

Here is what she showed me: my inability to close the laptop was not a personal failing. It was not a lack of discipline or self-awareness. I had plenty of self-awareness — I described the