I’m with the Greeks. They had a word (”agon”) to describe all that they thought made us most human. You could translate that word as “struggle” or “strive” or even “compete” - strive for excellence in anything that man does and that animals don’t do. Along came the Middle Ages and that sort of stuff was supposed to be verboten. We were to suppress those impulses and submit to God’s will - to divest ourselves of our puny little egos, as John puts it. This new idea that came in with Christianity (and far earlier in other cultures) is powerful and deserves respect. In the West it comes into the Romantic Tradition without its Christian baggage. Some of the most powerful poetry of William Wordsworth draws on it:

“The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.

Think you, ‘mid all lthis mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.”

There’s more to Wordsworth than this, but you see what I mean.

I’m with the Greeks. I understand the impulse to kick back and get out of the way of the universe, which doesn’t care much about us. You could call that “wise passiveness”. You could also call it submitting to the inhuman.