Today, finding a “working-age” American who has earned the ability not to work and actively chooses to do so is incredibly challenging. Some of us may have achieved this feat, either through savings, frugality, inheritance, or a combination of these and other factors, but because of the immense pressure and judgment from American society, we still prefer to give off the impression of busyness rather than focusing our energies on simply enjoying ourselves, our friends and family, or the things that simply interest us for their own sake.
And if found, it’s almost as if we incapable of interacting with this type of human – we lack the traditional bond of “the grind” and can’t fathom how this allegedly mortal specimen is capable of existing each day without work. What could they possibly be doing all day? Our small talk flounders because we simply don’t know where to turn next in conversation once the standard discussions on what we “do for a living” are off the table. And then, almost by instinct from over two centuries of mind warping, we smother any sense of envy, jealousy, insecurity or curiosity by reminding ourselves that because of our work, whether enjoyable or not, it is we who are more virtuous, more morally upright. We are a nation founded on work – we should just go on working and cease to consider this alternative form of living, even when individual or collective surplus and abundance is achieved.
In addition to the rise of “Salvation by Work” in America, a major reason for this bias is leisure’s negative reputation, particularly from a historical perspective. Anyone who examines the development of leisure over time will quickly identify that many of those who possessed sufficient leisure to contribute to our progress as civilization – through the cultivation of the arts and sciences, philosophy and religion, democracy and governance, psychology and social relations – did so while resting on the labors of an oppressed and often enslaved working class. This wasn’t always the case, but it was enough of the time to sully leisure’s reputation. This is one reason why we sometimes hesitate when we earn leisure, such as through retirement – we feel like we’ve earned a spot in a club that we aren’t sure we want to be a part of.
The Greeks, for example, sought wisdom. To gain wisdom, they had to practice leisure. Not everyone could have leisure, though: without food, water, or shelter with which to subsist, life could not produce sufficient time for leisure. As a result, to allow Greece’s greatest thinkers to think, reason, and reinvent – activities which, they rightly argued, are what separated humanity from the animals – it required the labors of slaves and poor freemen, or those who were technically free yet bound to their occupations for survival, such as farming, masonry or carpentry.[1]
In modern terms, it is hard to pursue art, music, poetry, or philosophy when doing the laundry or attending to toddlers, so the Greeks had domestic servants handling most of the day to day chores to free up their time.[2]
Our founding fathers were no different – though each of them clearly had notable active, public aspects of their lives, they considered these duties as the necessary debts paid in exchange for what they considered the more ideal form of living, that of private, retired yet active leisure at home, leisure which relied on the labors of others in order to sustain.
For example, George Mason, a man who for years embraced quiet retirement and avoided public affairs like the plague, is credited with pivoting our founding documents, such as federal and state constitutions, from one’s right to the acquisition and preservation of property to the pursuit of happiness, which adequately summarized the American definition of freedom at independence: “an open-ended, democratic process whereby individuals develop their own potential and seek to realize their own life goals…individual self-fulfillment, unimpeded by government.”[3] In his will, he advised his sons to “prefer the happiness of a private station to the trouble and vexations of public business.”
Thomas Jefferson would often appear so disturbed at having to leave Monticello, where he had “the blessing of being free to say and do what I please,” that his political foes presumed he was putting on some sort of an act, though in reality he was genuinely lamenting the need to depart his private role as an architect, horticulturist, intellectual, and writer, amongst other amateur pursuits.
John Adams, just prior to the Revolution, thought his public life was complete and was set to become the happiest man in the world, subsisting on potatoes and seaweed in a small, New England seaside hut with fifty acres, a library and desk to amuse himself into eternity. (He was pulled into ten more years of public service).
And George Washington, who, according to legend, never mounted his horse to depart his beloved Mount Vernon without a sigh, openly detested his political duties, preferring “the more rational amusement of cultivating the earth”.
These men held and practiced the classic ideal of a good life through leisure – one in which they went without leisure in order to enjoy leisure, in which the Roman neg-otium (un-leisure, or work/business) precedes the otium (leisure), one in which humans could pursue joy on Earth with
a small estate, un-harassed by tax collectors, on which to enjoy good friends and good wine, a choice library, tranquility, and the contemplation of the cosmos, the world and its affairs. To be free of necessity and therefore free to do whatever one wants to for itself alone – this to them was the pursuit of happiness. In this they could not have been more classical.[4]
Yet nearly everything these men cherished in their personal lives – the conversations with eclectic guests, the pursuits of arts and sciences, the cultivation of crops, the advancement of political science, and so forth – and much of what they achieved in the public arena (such as the creation of modern democracy) rested partially if not solely on the time they acquired through the utilization of slaves for day to day labor.
Judging Our Freedom
Despite the unquestionable examples of leisure’s positive influence on human existence and the immense contributions to humanity achieved by prior leisure classes, leisure as a concept is clearly tainted, smeared, and sullied due to the two key factors discussed: the elevation of work to a religious, moral, and patriotic duty following the Great Depression, and the oppressive means by which the time for leisure was acquired at certain points in history.
As a result, we often view those who achieve a leisurely life in our modern era with immense skepticism and judgment, including ourselves, even when the means by which we’ve achieved said leisure is honorable or decent.
For example, members of the increasingly popular “FIRE” movement (financial independence, retire early) often find themselves judged for the freedoms they achieve. Concepts like passive income, in which one generates and lives off of funding from stock and bond dividends and real-estate are viewed with immense incredulity – one only needs to scroll briefly through the comments section of any give “FIRE” blog to see examples of how many Americans are repulsed by the idea of ridding oneself of compulsory work, occupying oneself instead with activities, projects or pursuits we simply find meaningful, when and where we please.
For example, below is a common comment directed at a particularly influential FIRE blogger:
There is obviously a portion of the population that is lucky enough to have found or created a career that they would do for free – a professor who loves researching and teaching and learning, or a medical professional who loves saving lives and the work environment she has created for herself. But for the vast majority of us – well over half according to most studies – we find ourselves in jobs that we truly do not enjoy, that we know are useless, pointless occupations which would have little to no impact on society if they ceased to exist, ones in which we are forced to appear busy for 40 hours a week even with nothing much to do, and ones we would leave immediately if the money wasn’t needed.1
Or, perhaps we enjoy what we do, but wish there was a way to do it in smaller quantities: for four hours a day, three days a week, or a couple months per year.
As Peter Adeney has noted, “early retirement means quitting any job that you wouldn’t do for free – but then continuing right ahead with work in something that works for you, even when you don’t need the money.”
Or, put differently:
Does this mean you will quit commuting through traffic into a lame corporate office to sit in meetings about products you don’t really care about? Yes.
But does it mean you won’t work hard at things that are important to you, for the rest of your life? NO!”
Critics may have forgotten, or more likely never known at all, that Aristotle’s classic, noble leisure in fact was not a noun, but a verb – to leisure – and as a result indicated a very active existence practicing “human virtue” in activities that are self-contained and satisfying in themselves, activities which indeed make us distinct from other species. And this habit, of practicing and pursing noble leisure on a recurring basis, is what defined happiness, or Arisotle’s eudaimonia.
In addition to our skepticism of the financially independent, our view of asceticism and frugality, once respected virtues, are now full of suspicion, almost as if excess material consumerism and gadgetry is the American Way, and working one’s entire adult life to fund this excess is a part of the agreement and exchange for living in the Land of the Free.
It is selfish and cheap, they say, to live off of one’s savings, pursuing activities, ideas, and projects for their own sake – even those which positively contribute to others – rather than contributing to the growth of the economy through daily and weekly economic transactions, like a normal American Consumer.
Even worse, we allow this negative view of leisure to influence our perception of ourselves and how we spend our own time. On a simple, day to day level, most corporate, knowledge or office-based workers can admit to feeling the need to “look busy” at the workplace (often more so when working from home), even if a task or assignment was completed ahead of schedule. Similarly, many of us feel the gravity of email while on a well-earned summer vacation, almost like a heavy guilt for enjoying such a leisurely hiatus from work. We should be working, after all – work is the right and moral thing to do.
On a larger scale, some of us achieve a savings amount that would qualify us for retirement, yet balk at the acceptance and implementation of such a free life. In other words, we save enough in our early career (annual spending multiplied by 25) to live by the 4% rule for the duration of our time on earth, but go on working full time because we feel like we are morally obligated to do so, that work is good, or because we realize we would not know what to do with our time if it required a purpose of its own, something wholly different than its current role as a respite from an eventual return to compulsory work.
We can enjoy short bursts of “free time” when this time is buttoned-up on the front and back end by paid obligations (time such as a weekend, a day off, “time on one’s hands”, or “time to kill”), but we balk at the idea of a pure, total freedom that has shed its temporal frame of reference.
Much of this is tied up in the other “benefits” of a job we secretly desire outside of the income it provides. Paid work gives us a sense of participation in the affairs of the city, country or world and often allows us to feel needed and valued. It gives us a sense of place in the grander scheme of things and a sense of status in conversation – regardless of what we actually do day to day, week to week (which very well may be sitting in a cubicle, staring at a computer, attempting to look busy for 8 hours a day), we enjoy sharing our job titles and the companies or organizations we work for, often providing “chattering interpretations”[5] of ourselves, because of the status they indirectly communicate to an analogous audience.
In addition to income, we find that these indirect benefits, and the sense of security and routine they provide to our day to day lives, are worth the tedious nature of most of our jobs. Work for most of us is therefore a tedious necessity, and a necessary burden we assume for the sake of our day to day existence. And when this day to day existence no longer requires the income-based benefits of compulsory work, such as in retirement, we often go on working because of our need for these other social benefits, given that for most of us it is challenging to develop long-term, alternative inner options, alternative means to fill the void beyond work. We miss being a part of the “useful and social life.”[6]
In the spirit of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we’ve invented and accepted a delusion that our best and only path “to be” is through compulsory work, whereas leisure and retirement are sure paths “not to be.”[7] When, in fact, the truth is that full-time employment is simply the most accepted and common alternative “to be” we’ve had at our disposal the past two hundred years, since a genuine consideration of what “to be” really means for each of us – and the actual practice of being without the facade of a job – can only be achieved in a state of leisure,[8] something which many of us rarely experience, or avoid altogether.
In our traditional American retirement – in the state of “not-work” after a long period of “work”– the passive, decision-less necessity of reporting to our day to day job is now replaced with active, free choice. Instead of having the default, compulsory obligation to work, we have a daily decision regarding other forms of life and living and being. We now independently determine when, where and how to occupy our time, with whom to occupy it with, and most importantly why, the interrogative with the broadest and most challenging aperture for interpretation.[9] To many of us, this is terrifying. To others, it is boring.
When so many of us derive our only status, value, purpose, or meaning from our job, we may find our existence in retirement to be more like languishing rather than leisure, privation rather than privacy. We may feel as if it can be as tedious as work, except that it is now an inactive tedium, almost like a never-ending state of inertia. The initial burst of what we thought would be freedom is quickly consumed and converted to idleness.[10]
From a cultural perspective, this is troubling. But from an educational one, it may be an opportunity.
Of Time, Work and Leisure ↑
Of Time, Work and Leisure ↑
Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 20 ↑
De Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure ↑
Shop Class as Soulcraft, 15 ↑
Of Time, Work and Leisure ↑
Take Time for Paradise ↑
Seneca ↑
Take Time for Paradise ↑
Take Time for Paradise, 21. ↑
- David Graeber – Bullshit Jobs, a Theory ↩︎