I recently heard about The Earth Abides, a post-apocalyptic science fiction book written in 1949. In the book, almost everyone is killed by a flu pandemic, and the story centers on a small group of survivors. It was really surprisingly good, with very little dating it as nearly 75 years old. There's not a lot of high drama and excitement, but lots of insight into our world if nearly all the people were gone and there was not much reason to hold on to the old ways.
One passage in particular struck me as relevant to this sub:
“But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Men invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at least that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the fob” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm-clock were not so much the symbols of man's dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile. “
I really connected with this, because I've been struggling with finding joy in my personal time, and avoiding feeling like some things I enjoy doing (like taking my kids to the beach) are work rather than play.