Monday-morning feeling does not reflect laziness.
I suggest it is rather hopelessness, a hopelessness that has plenty to do but no satisfying reason for doing it. It is not possible to live a meaningful human life unless you believe something about the future. Alexander Pope was getting at it in his famous lines:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
To try to live without hope is like trying to play football without goalposts. You may dribble the ball with great skill, execute some fine passes, even enjoy the game to an extent. But what's the point of it all? Unless there's some purpose, some objective, some goal for human existence, the whole show is a monstrous farce. Stephen Crane’s poem in The Black Riders expresses this point well:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
‘It is futile,’ I said, ‘You can never—’
‘You lie,’ he cried,
And ran on.
That surely is the absurdity of much which we today so optimistically call 'progress'. You can talk about advancing only when you have a clear idea of where you are supposed to be going.
The dilemma of modern secular men and women is that we no longer possess such a sense of direction. It is like the counsel of despair adopted by the British government when it ruled Ireland during the potato blight. In order to sustain the morale of the people by providing employment, the British ordered the construction of unnecessary roads, roads that went nowhere.
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