Why Your Leisure Time is in Danger
Takeaways:
Pundits and business columnists have long pushed for measures that help people protect their personal time– from a four-day workweek, paid parental leave, and stricter caps on mandatory overtime. Many of these thinkers justify giving us back our time by arguing it will boost overall prosperity — a well-rested workforce, the reasoning goes, is a more productive one.
Why is this? Neuroscientists point to the “incubation period” that often precedes moments of insight— a stretch of time free from task-related thinking. Cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, have found that leisure fosters a kind of “intrinsic motivation” that’s especially effective for learning. We return to work from times of leisure functioning at a higher level.
But, Pelc points out– studies and experiments that show the power of leisure also illuminate a tricky paradox: that leisure is only useful when it is truly leisure. Leisure is doing things for one’s own sake, to pursue what one wants. We should fight the urge to reduce leisure time to a productivity hack. Doing so reduces its benefits.
The private sector will keep trying to blur that line. Management experts rave about how “daydreaming at work can fuel creativity.” Forward-thinking firms have responded with office hammocks, foosball tables, and happy hours. Given that nearly half the U.S. labor force is now engaged in some form of knowledge work — and that personal devices keep us plugged in at all hours, regardless of location — the ability to tap into leisure’s creative potential has taken on real economic value.
Pelc pushed back: If leisure is justified by its contribution to work-related outcomes—innovation, productivity, growth—it stands to lose any perceived worth as soon as it comes into conflict with those goals. An eventual clash between the leisure and work will always be settled in favor of work.
The takeaway is that we must enforce our own leisure time. Both because truly enjoying our leisure time allows us to come back to work fully rested, but also to get the most out of it from the perspective of our own holistic wellness and overall enjoyment of our time on earth.
As philosopher Josef Pieper wrote, to be at leisure was, in his words, “at once a human and super-human condition.” We must protect that condition.
From Krzysztof Pelc at The Atlantic:
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