“No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”

— Bob Black in his famous essay, “The Abolition of Work.”

From childhood, we’re taught that work is noble, that our work is our Identity, that work provides meaning in life. Yet there are many reasons why work is actually bad — assuming we use the standard definition of work as tasks we perform for pay or some artificial reward like grades, and in a manner focused on efficiency rather than enjoyment.

Here are seven Reasons Why You Should Work Less or Not at All:

1) Work is bad for your health. Insufficient sleep and sitting at a desk all day is a lot less healthy than, say, playing outside while gathering fruit and nuts.

2) Work is a huge source of stress. According to St. Paul Fire and

Marine Insurance Company, “Problems at work are more strongly associated with health complaints than are any other life stressor — more so than even financial problems or family problems.”

3) Work can kill you. Karoshi — death from overworking — is an official occupational disease in Japan.

4) Lots of work is actually bad for the world. David C. Korten, a former Harvard Business School professor wrote in “When Corporations Rule the World,” “The possibilities are extraordinary if we acknowledge that many existing jobs not only are unsatisfying but also involve producing goods and services that are either unnecessary or cause major harm to society and to the environment. This includes a great many of the jobs in the automobile, chemical, packaging and petroleum industries; most advertising and marketing jobs; the brokers and financial portfolio managers engaged in speculative and other extractive forms of investment; ambulance-chasing lawyers; 14 million arms industry workers worldwide; and the 30 million people employed by the world’s military forces. This leads to a startling fact. Instead of paying hundreds of million of people sometimes outrageous amounts to do things that are harmful to the quality of our living, we would be better off if we gave them the same pay to sit home and do nothing.”

5) Work distracts us from what we care about besides our work.

6) Work devalues things we don’t do for pay. There are plenty of valuable things people might do without pay, but the fact that they aren’t “work” makes them seem less valuable to others and to the people who do them. Compare this with the way that courses and grades devalue self-motivated learning; because formal courses exist, people don’t put much stock in learning on their own.

7) Work detracts from relationships with friends, family, lovers, etc. How many relationships have failed because one or both people put work ahead of the other? It’s hard to switch between work, which is focused on efficiency, and relationships, in which the focus is almost the opposite.

On the other hand, idleness is pretty bad, too. I’ll trust that I don’t have to lay out seven reasons for you to be convinced that not doing much is also bad for your well-being.

Most people say that we need to balance work and play in order to schedule time for baths or watching movies, in-between intense study sessions or 60-hour work weeks.

But I think this sort of life causes people to miss out on one of the most satisfying things life has to offer — active play.

Bob Black writes that stopping work “doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a lucid conviviality, commensality and maybe even art ... Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.”

I think it’s true that people like to be active. If you don’t believe it about yourself, take some time off and allow yourself to create your own challenges and engage in things that sometimes are called work — for their own sake.

Other than the fear that without work or courses to motivate us, we wouldn’t do anything, other fears impel us to keep working: the fear that without a traditional job, we’ll become homeless, or that without a large salary, we won’t be able to do what we want to do in life, or that without a prestigious job, we will be nobodies.

Yet there are plenty of ways to find fulfillment in life besides traditional professions; there are plenty of ways to support yourself and others without spending much money; and there are plenty of ways to challenge yourself outside the job market.

In fact, I don’t think we should be afraid of not “working.” Instead, given the hazards and opportunity costs of holding down a job, we should fear work itself.

Andrea Runyan doesn’t include writing her column as work. E-mail any questions, comments, gripes to arunyan@stanford.edu. To see where she got such crazy ideas, check out http://www.andreabooks.blogdrive.com.