Towards a Leisure Ethic
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It wasn't always this way
Artisans in preindustrial England took it as a given that more free time was better than work, even when more work promised greater monetary returns. When the prices they could command for their goods rose, they saw it as an opportunity not to amass wealth but to work less.
Having free time is scary
At least when we face the demands of work or other nondiscretionary time commitments, we don’t have to bother with the daunting question of what we should do with ourselves. Although the finitude of life ought to inspire an eagerness to seize the day, freedom, in this open-ended sense, can be agonizing, terrifying, overwhelming. Better to “keep busy,” to “have something to do,” and not to think about the fable of the horse that, growing tired of its freedom, allowed itself to be saddled, and was ridden to death.
What's the alternative?
For decades, most people have organized their lives around the forty-hour, five-day week. What if it were fifteen hours a week? What if it were zero?
What comes next is open to negotiation and experimentation, but the process would necessarily require what Nietzsche called a revaluation of values. The idea of work for the sake of work would become an insult to human intelligence and dignity. Lives dedicated to the insatiable pursuit of money or other zero-sum goods would come to be recognized as pathological. The culture of commercialism presumably would be curtailed, or replaced with new norms and institutions emphasizing fulfilling experiences over luxuries and stuff. The very idea of “unemployment” would cease to exist. Greater investments (of both time and money) in liberal arts educations and institutions would come to be seen as not only desirable but necessary for equipping people to lead fruitful lives.
But what about meaning
The standard rejoinder to any starry-eyed vision of mass leisure is that work is not only necessary but also more rewarding than the alternatives. One’s job, it is said, confers a sense of responsibility, as well as a daily structure. People want to work, it is said, so that they can “contribute to society” and “provide for their families.” For most people, work is considered one of the only viable sources of meaning, enjoyment, self-identity, and community.
Although there may be value for some people in the structure that work provides, it beggars belief to claim that most people like working a job. No one prefers Mondays to Fridays, the former being the day when most suicides occur.
Only about a third of employees in the United States—and just 20 percent globally—feel “engaged at work.”
(See also Bullshit Jobs)
Set aside those fortunate few who truly love what they do. For most people, it is rather disappointing to think that one’s purpose in life is to participate in marginal improvements to already high standards of living, or to “make a better mousetrap.” And many jobs cannot even be said to be doing that.
Meaningfulness is a distinct category of the good life. It arises from devoting yourself to things that are both worthy of devotion and seen by others to be so. “A person who loves smoking pot all day long, or doing endless crossword puzzles, and has the luxury of being able to indulge in this without restraint,” might be happy, Wolf explains, but that “does not thereby make her life meaningful.” By the same token, caring for your child or visiting a loved one in the hospital might not be particularly enjoyable, but nobody would say that such activities constitute time poorly spent. The most fulfilling uses of time, Wolf suggests, occur in the moments when subjective preferences line up with objective standards of value—that is, when time is given over to a project you view as an end in itself, and that independent observers would also appreciate or recognize as worthwhile in some way
How should leisure time be spent?
To the classical Greek philosophers (who generally had the luxury of knowing what true leisure felt like), time was best spent freely developing one’s own faculties, observing the world, and contemplating the universe.
Leisure thus represents engagement with ends—the age-old sources of meaning in life. Ends are determined by the process of eliminating means: If the reason you work is to support your family, your job is a means and your family is an end. But ends can be truly valued only when you are unburdened by life’s stresses or compulsions within your own mind.
Following this distinction between means and ends, Aristotle suggested that work and all other useful activities should be ordered around securing leisure
Just as peace is the proper end or purpose of war, leisure is the proper end of work. It exists for itself and does not answer to any instrumental demands.
Having vs Being
Critical theorist Erich Fromm observed that the postindustrial West’s “kind of ‘pursuit of happiness’ does not produce well-being,” because it is dominated by an attitude of “having” rather than “being.” Someone in the “having mode” who comes across a striking flower immediately wants to pick it, to possess it (or, in a digital context, to Instagram it or mint it as a nonfungible token), whereas someone in the “being mode” is able simply to enjoy the experience, free from the pangs of acquisitive desire.
See also Hedonic Treadmill
We form ourselves to fit a mold
The key to success in such a society, Fromm concluded, is to transform yourself into a thing (or, in today’s parlance, into a personal brand, a unit of “human capital”). This is particularly true in the white-collar world, where the prospective employee is “forced to sell his ‘personality,’ his smile, his opinions into the bargain.” From this, complete alienation follows==. People “do not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did) to hold onto, that belong to them, that do not change. For they constantly change their egos, according to the principle ‘I am as you desire me.’ ==The leisure ethic that emerges in Fromm’s work calls for a revaluation of values—a recognition that the things we think we want may be bad for us, and that we should restructure our lives accordingly.
What would this look like?
For starters, a society with a leisure ethic would systematically deprioritize work, regarding it merely as something to be endured—and busyness for the sake of busyness as something to be pitied or scorned. Once the necessities of life were attended to, those with a leisure ethic would occupy their time doing things they both wanted to do and would not regret having done upon later reflection.
See also
For most people, an honest deathbed reckoning would return to long-held truths common to most philosophical and religious traditions. A life devoted to feeding insatiable desires (for wealth, status, success, followers), for example, will always ultimately disappoint. Indeed, most previous generations would have considered such an existence pathological. Insatiable desires are literally unfulfilling, by dint of their being insatiable. Moderation is key, “taking advantage of Fortune’s gifts, but not becoming their slave.
Just as no one ever looks back and wishes she had spent more time at the office, nor will anyone today later wish she had spent more time streaming videos and “twitching puppetwise” to the tugs of algorithms.