The late critic Christopher Lasch, writing in The Culture of Narcissism, noted the American tendency for “the invasion of play by the rhetoric of achievement”—a kind of cultural infection in which the virus of Protestant work ethic steals into the otherwise unself-conscious body of fun. Hence, the aggressive, goal-oriented forms of play so much favoured by weekend warriors of various kinds: mountain climbing, triathlon racing, extreme or high-risk sports, but also the slightly crazed Saturday-afternoon attempts to get through all the enjoyable leisure-time activities of gardening, decorating, cooking, eating and socializing before sundown. Even the standard forms of urban dissolution – drinking and doing drugs, say, or staying up late – are annexed to the peculiar rhetoric of achievement, creating the odd spectacle of apparently non-conformist or anti-establishment hipsters bragging to each other about how drunk, how stoned or how tired they are, just like plaid-sporting businessmen comparing golf handicaps.
— Mark Kingwell in Better Living.
