"Something is going on with work in our culture. We’ve lost our rhythms of work and rest. And work is becoming a crisis issue." --Tim Keller

Tim Keller had some interesting things to say about how people today in our culture are trying to justify their existence through their work in his sermon Made for Stewardship.

Are we entitled to the money we earn?

Today, if you're in a situation where you've got math skills and it makes you incredibly, incredibly wealthy, because you know how to use those in a society that values technology and values finance, rather than people skills, which means that you change bed pans and you become a therapist or a nurse or something and you very little money, if you just happen to have the gifts that in this particular time and place, because you born here and not on a mountain in Tibet in the 13th century, because you're born here, you get rich, don't you think that it came to you? Don't you think that you earned it? Of course you didn't earn it. Your talents just happened to work out in such a way that you make money.
Then make sure that you're generous with that money, incredibly generous, because it was given to you.
-- Tim Keller^[1]

Quotes about Self-Justifying Work

Every time I accomplish something I feel like a special human being, but after a little while I feel mediocre and uninteresting again. I find I have to get myself past this again and again. My drive in life is from the horrible fear of being mediocre. I have to prove I'm somebody.
-- Madonna^[2]

I just want to go the distance. If I can go that distance, you know, and that bell rings, and I'm still standing, I'm gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood.
-- Rocky^[3]

In one hour's time I will be out there again. I will raise my eyes and look down that corridor; 4 feet wide, with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. But will I?
-- Harold Abrams in Chariots of Fire: