It's fine if it doesn't happen every day. Don't be obsessed about this stuff. Forgive yourself if you ever behave sub-optimally. You're not a machine, neither should you be one.
Tyranny starts with the best of intentions.
"These four verbs aren’t a productivity system or a self-help formula. Some days I forget one. Other days, one takes over. But when I return to them, they gently reorient me."
You may be overreacting with words like "machine" and "tyranny" to an idea simply suggested as a useful and helpful goal.
As for machines and tyranny, they're terms capturing the Zeitgeist all too well.
But this is a good thing; if I waste a day without learning or doing anything, I feel bad about myself. And I want to feel bad! Always pushing to improve myself has helped me immensely. It's easy to keep telling yourself 'oh, I'll do better tomorrow'; it's harder to actually do better tomorrow.
That's not to say you shouldn't take it easy on yourself every once in a while. But figuring out those exceptions isn't what this article is about, and it's certainly not a 'tyrannical' article. As a society I feel we have gone way too far in this direction; sometimes life is hard! Sometimes you have to do hard things! And often it will pay off later in life and you'll be glad you put in the work.
Life is not binary. Routines are not classified into hippie XOR hardcore. Not feeling bad for not improving yourself is a good sign of having actually improved. But that's just my opinion. Take care.
What Zeitgeist? The spirit of this age is laziness, overeating, selfness. Everything is too difficult and... the fault of those tyrants!
Of course there's nothing to forgive. There's no need to course-correct against a way that almost no-one will feel.
> Tyranny starts with the best of intentions.
Placing an irrelevant (and untrue) statement such as this next to the point you're making to imply that it reinforces it is a bit manipulative.