People keep asking me what am I doing, what am I going to do with myself. If you ask that question, you won’t understand why I can’t answer. Sir E.W.B.N.
Our society has developed a reflexive sentimentality for lost ages when life was simpler, slower. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck when reading letters, memoirs, and biographies from a century or more ago at the seeming abundance of leisure time. The overwhelming sense and oft-expressed feeling is that people used to have more time. Literally, of course, time passes at the same rate as ever. Surprisingly, we actually have much more time than our ancestors. Life expectancy in the developed world has roughly doubled since 1850. Yet, we feel as if we have less time than ever. This seeming contradiction is partly resolved when one considers that while we may have in fact more time, what we feel is a subjective lack of time. Riding on horseback, reading long novels, or simply moving through existence at a slower pace, life seemed to be more leisurely in some preceding golden age.
Part of the explanation for our sense of lost leisure is that our ancestors had fewer distractions. Without television, radio, recorded music, magazines, movies, telephones, computers, and other marvels of modern technology, people had fewer distractions. Total up the hours a week you spend with the above and see how much more time you would have without them. For the average American, the elimination of these activities would free up more than 30 hours a week – 1,500 hours a year – the equivalent of a full time job. Many of these innovations seem to add convenience or luxury. Whatever their other merits, however, they all take time. Increasingly, it is time that we feel we cannot spare.
Commuting was also virtually unknown. As recently as 1970s half of all workers walked to work. The vast majority of people who worked outside of the home walked to work for the entirety of human history. Whatever your average commute, it is time essentially deducted from your leisure. Further, the average car owner spends between 500-1,000 hours a year in a car. Our car-oriented society, combined with other technologies, consumes time, an astonishing 2,000-3,000 hour a year. Time that in the past used for the activities we now look upon with envy.
Yet, for all of the calls we have on our time, it remains that leisure is predominantly an outlook. Isaac Newton, for instance, considered himself and was considered a man of leisure. This while he repeatedly worked himself to physical collapse with experiments, philosophical reflections, translations, mathematics, and sundry other projects. A near hermit, he lived much of his life in simple rooms at Cambridge. He had, we would say, the leisure to pursue what he would. And herein lies part of the key of understanding leisure. Leisure is the time you can spend as you will. Newton had limited, very limited, teaching and preaching duties at Cambridge and had servants to clean his rooms. This freed up a great deal of time for him to use as he saw fit, and he saw fit to revolutionize our understanding of the world. Hence, despite his Herculean labors, he was man of leisure par excellence.
The root of leisure is the Latin licere – to be permitted or allowed. We must grant ourselves leisure if we are to have it. We must give ourselves the license to be leisurely. Of course, this runs precisely counter to our cultural ethos – which is a major factor in our lack of leisure. Time is supposed to be used productively. Our sense of endless productivity requires us to focus on some external goal and then strive to achieve that efficiently. We internalize a relentless time motion study and, of course, never quite measure up. Our most productive day is taken as a baseline against which all of our other efforts are found wanting. When we walk, we are walking for exercise, to lose weight or increase our aerobic capacity. The joy of the walk is, at best, a secondary consideration; it is not the thing itself. Meals become meetings, food becomes calories, fiber and fat. We do not allow ourselves to eat and enjoy pleasant company. To be leisurely in our culture is to fight one of our dominant cultural predispositions.
Given our cultural disdain for leisure, any attempt to be more leisurely is awkward. If leisure becomes another goal to be achieved, then is it self-defeating. Better to consider leisure a by-product of a way of existence. One must give oneself license to do what one is doing for the sake of the thing itself and the pleasure one derives from it. Pleasure is a major consideration. The same Latin root – licere –is the base of licentious. Leisure is giving oneself the license to be licentious – to give oneself over to pleasure. When we are enjoying what we are doing, then time slows, we wish to linger. Do less, do it more slowly, do it simply for the pleasure of the doing or, indeed, of the not doing. Trusting oneself to be guided by pleasure is a key to the achievement of leisure rightly understood. Be not productive, or effective; avoid at all costs efficiency. Keep a weather-eye to profound pleasures and chances are leisure will fall to you. Of course, living for pleasure alone, decadence if you will, is perhaps a risk, if it can be so called, of focusing too closely on a life of delights. People who gave themselves over entirely to the pursuit of pleasure were called sensualists or voluptuaries. However, our culture’s emphasis on productiveness ensures we will not suddenly drown in a flood of excess leisurely pleasures. Indeed, that both the words sensualist and voluptuary have fallen out of use, while workaholic and stressed have become commonplace, argues the risks lie in an entirely different direction.
One of the most envied people in our society is someone who loves their work. The reason is not far to find when the concept of leisure is understood as license. Society gives us license to work as much as we will – we are lauded for working. Loving one’s work, then, gives one license to do what would in any case – leisure – while simultaneously receiving public affirmation. Even here, though, one finds that people who love their work still feel the need to grumble as if it were an imposition. Admitting that one’s work is leisure moves one from license to licentiousness. Even if we are well pleased with our work, it is important to feign suffering. Pleasure, even pleasure in work, is not socially acceptable.
In the end, leisure is an outlook. Focusing on the pleasures of the moment will cause us to do less and do it more slowly and then we will feel more leisurely and discover a profounder sense of the grand richness of life.