In Part One of this series, we introduced the argument that Americans are uncomfortable with and in fear of retirement not simply because of financial or health concerns, but because of an overarching discomfort with how to fill the time.
We claimed that this discomfort is actually a symptom of a deeper, more troubling trend, that by fearing time and preferring passive, digital distractions or paid obligations in its place, we are essentially conceding that we are uncomfortable with our purportedly most prized possession, that of freedom, and incapable of exercising its most direct corollary, that of free choice.
Part Two, below, will attempt first to define this category of time, once known as leisure, as the definition has become diluted and somewhat forgotten in the past two hundred years. Then, we will break down the reasons for its decreasing importance, the first of which is our blind acceptance of compulsory, full-time, life-long labor as normal and good ever since the Great Depression, and our acceptance of work as the dominant obligation in life ever after.
In a future post, we will break down the second cause, which is the negative reputation of leisure in America, mostly due to the fact that prior leisure classes attained their free time by relying on an oppressed and often enslaved working class to carry out their daily duties. We will also examine companies experimenting with four-day workweeks and artificial intelligence’s potential to impact the future of the workweek.
If none of this interests you, consider this final point, which will be re-introduced in a future post. Classic leisure, and therefor modern retirement, doesn’t have to equate to decades without work. For most of us, there aren’t enough golf courses or cruises to meaningfully fill decades of freedom.
What it does and should mean, though, is earning the ability to to be extremely picky about the timing, location and substance of one’s work, to be able to differentiate between the unwanted demands of a compulsory, paid job and the benefits of freely chosen, active leisure, pursuits which from a distance might look very much like work but which are done for their own sake rather than income, even if income is eventually earned. And the fact that these “work-like” pursuits are freely chosen and voluntary is what makes all the difference – leisure, after all, includes any activity pursued for its own sake, any action (or inaction) which is free of necessity.
Earning the right to leisure means we can actively opt out of the most irritating parts of a job: the commuting, the politics, the meetings, or managerial ego and self-absorption. While most of us will never truly quit our desire to work, it is the freedom found in leisure that allows us to quit our job, and there is a difference.
A good friend recently retired “early”, ending his career in corporate America approximately twenty years before most Americans choose (or are able) to do so. He shared a screenshot of his CEO’s response.
In addition to the standard surprise and farewell pleasantries, she insinuated somewhat directly that if and when the time came in which he found early retirement to be a let-down, or not “exciting enough”, he should give her a call.
How did we get to a point in which time, something we work and hope to have more of during our entire adult lives, could be assumed to be so boring that we could reasonably presume a compulsory, 40+ hour office job to be preferable?
When did the land of the free forget how to fully exercise its freedom?
At what point did we begin losing our ability to “occupy our leisure”?
The Vocabulary of Work
When looking at time, work and leisure, it is important to first acknowledge that a nation’s language can say a lot about its values and priorities.
For example, the Dutch define their hygge as “a coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” Often associated with fireside candles, woolens, pastries, slippers, and sheepskin rugs, it is described as a “practical way of creating sanctuary in the middle of very real life”.[1] Though “cozy” is our closest translation, this adjective doesn’t really capture the concept entirely.
In Spain, the sobremasa describes the time spent around a table after a meal to chat, sip coffee, and simply pass time in comfort and company.
And in ancient Greece and Rome, there was no stand-alone word for work or business. Instead, they described these activities by attaching a negative prefix to their words for leisure: a-scholia in Greek and neg-otium in Latin. To put it differently, they could only communicate their concept of “work” by negating their ideal, which was leisure. They did without leisure in order to have leisure.[2] In their minds, the idea of work only existed in a realm of contrast.
Imagine if our word for work was collectively known as unleisure, which is essentially how the ancient Greeks and Romans communicated this concept. To the vast majority of Americans, this would be meaningless. Our collective understanding and prioritization of leisure is too weak to be able to communicate an alternative concept simply through negation.
Instead, we communicate a diluted concept of leisure by framing it within our modern American ideal, that of work, through the phrase “free time”, which to us is simply time “free” from our dominant obligation, that of work. Similarly, our “time off” is simply the time we have which is “off” the regimented, clocked, all-consuming work time.
These examples illustrate much more than etymological nuance – they display philosophical differences in cultural and societal priorities, differences so profound that some countries and cultures are no longer able to communicate exactly what it is they are trying to achieve, what they are trying to fix, or what they are striving for, because they don’t have the necessary vocabulary to do so.
These word choices are also meaningful because they illustrate work’s dominance in what might otherwise be a true work-life balance. “Free time” or “time off” – whether an hour for lunch, a three-day weekend, or that rare two-week vacation – are hardly free: they are inherently part of the world of work, as these breaks are for the sake of work, in order to allow for more work, or to refresh us from work so that we may generate more productive work as soon as we return.[3]
In many ways, our increasing inability to embrace and enjoy retirement might be a reflection of our collective failure to genuinely define what it is, or what it should be. And this, in turn, might be related to our diluted interpretation of leisure.
Defining Leisure
While only a few books have been written on the subject, the authors vary widely with regards to the purpose and meaning of leisure in modern society. These include Of Time, Work, and Leisure by Sebastien de Grazia, Take Time for Paradise by Bartlett Giamatti, Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, The Garlands of Repose by Michael O’Laughlin, Free Time by Benjamin Hunnicutt, and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Some of these focus on the religious and philosophical aspects of leisure, or how Americans and their sports are a distinct subset of leisure, some focus on the history of the labor movement in America, whereas others focus on the psychology of leisure and how to recreate the mental state it induces in other aspects of our lives. Regardless, the authors seem to agree on a handful of principles, which are outlined below.
Leisure is a condition in which one is free of necessity.
This is most often achieved when one is free from the necessity to work, but can also include freedom from any activity one finds necessary to perform, but would prefer to be free of.
The activities one pursues within this condition are pursued for their own sake. These sorts of activities are self-contained and desirable in and of themselves, otherwise described as “autotelic”. Simply because they cannot be included within the definition of “useful” in terms of modern productivity, “life-hacking”, or utilitarian standards does not designate them as useless.
Leisure is qualitative, not quantitative.
Our modern free time, or time off, is measured in hours, days, and weeks, but with leisure, time plays no role. True leisure is a mental or spiritual condition, or state of mind, not a block of hours or days one lists on a timesheet. Leisure, when achieved, is a carefree, outside of oneself experience that can last mere minutes or even full days, such as athletes feeling “in the zone” or the sort of “flow” state often described by artists and athletes. Time as we know it is often skewed immensely: hours feel like minutes, or minutes feel like hours.
Leisure is freedom: free choice combined with free time with no outside interference and no external restraints.
If we are at leisure only when we are truly free, the good state should exist, in part, to provide us with leisure.
If leisure is all of the above, and leisure is good, how did we drift so far away from it as a society?
Labor, Toil and Work
First, it is worth illustrating that the word “work” has changed over time and skewed our interpretation of leisure as a result. Historically, the words “labor” and “toil” implied what they still imply today: strenuous exertion, often painful in application. “Work”, however had a broad array of meanings and interpretations, and had not yet become the catch-all word for all things productive, useful, paid, or otherwise busy: one can find uses in phrases like works of art, religious good works, or even the inner workings of wine for a few examples. The encroachment of “work” as we know and refer to it now was gradual, arriving steadily on the scene in the late 19th century, following the Market and Industrial Revolutions.[4]
Prior to its arrival, if you “worked”, you actually labored or toiled. And if you did something for a living other than these sorts of actions, you did not in fact do something, but in instead you actually were something, such as a doctor, carpenter, farmer, or blacksmith. The daily duties of these occupations were rarely called “work” though, as the differences were too great to fit under the single label of work. But with the onset of machines and factory labor, the lightening of man’s labor and toil, and the separation, simplification and standardization of tasks in the production process, we began to see a shift in the meaning of work, and its application to all forms of income-generating activities.[5]
As a result of this shift in the meaning of work, and work becoming a catch-all phrase for anything useful, income-generating, and productive from an economic perspective, we began equating leisure, or time “off” from the paid clock, as the complete opposite of work: idle, inert, unproductive and wasteful in a modern, capitalist society.
But it wasn’t always this way.
This transition to a “total work” mindset, the one in which we live to work, rather than work to live, and accept working for work’s sake as completely normal – was gradual and progressed over time with fits and starts, eventually overpowering 100 years of progress towards the shortening of the hours of labor in America during the Great Depression.
The Work-Life Balance Over Time
Leisure peaked as a cultural concept and priority during in Greek and Roman times. Soon after, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the fall of the cities and aqueducts, we were thrust back into frontier conditions, requiring work from men, women, and children in order to survive the early era of the Middle Ages. Work was not a choice from a philosophical perspective – it was once again a requirement for survival.
It was the monasteries which, once basic needs were reestablished and met, brought the role and meaning of work and leisure back into philosophical discussion. St. Benedict’s order, for example, the most influential in the medieval West, commanded monks to engage in steady manual labor, whether necessary or not, arguing that “idleness is the enemy of the soul” (Rule XLVIII) and that by working simply with one’s hands – in simple activities which “distracted the least” – could the mind be freed for thought and contemplation, which in this era was the highest and most prized of all forms of living.
Later, at the height of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas argued that while work was a necessary component of life and our nature, when given a surplus – the condition in which we can subsist without all having to work all the time – we are under no obligation to work for work’s sake. In fact, this era concluded that it was sloth, restlessness, and “leisurelessness”, or the incapacity to enjoy leisure, which sat at the bottom of the totem pole of human existence. To properly capture this state of mind, the concept of acedia was developed to communicate the despair, languishing, and idleness which rendered leisure impossible.
With the Renaissance came another shift in the philosophy of work: more focus on praxis (practice), less on theoria (theory), prioritizing Scientia operativa (practical sciences) over Scientia contemplative (theoretical/contemplative sciences), and using the former to guide the latter. Through the concept of humanism, we began viewing labor not just as a necessity or burden, but as a genuine source of personal fulfillment. Material work, viewed as a confining, restrictive activity in the Middle Ages, blossomed with new meaning and interpretation. The world of the Renaissance existed for human transformation, and in this act of transformation, in our ability to subdue nature and bend her to our will, we can leave behind the world of animals and approach a higher order, spirit, and nature. With this fresh perspective, Renaissance work required that one’s hands touch materials, and emphasized the beauty of non-agricultural, manual pursuits such as sculpture, paint, architecture and science. By the end of this grand experiment, work had earned the dignity which the word craftsmanship still carries today.[6]
But it wasn’t until the 18th century, the arrival of factories, and the timely thesis of a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith in which the worlds of work and leisure were truly flipped upside down. In his book The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that an act is and only can be truly productive if it takes raw material and turns it into something useful to man. This sort of work, he argued, is what produces wealth. The “producers” are actually the workers, whereas the idle, or those in leisure who produce nothing, are worthless.[7]
Philosophically, his argument resembles that of the Florentines of the Renaissance, their humanism, and the dignity they found and illustrated through certain forms of labor. The difference, though, was that Smith’s life, and his book, overlapped with the advent of power machinery and factories. As a result, one can argue confidently that Leonardo and Michelangelo would not have approved of the sort of “wealth-producing” work espoused by Smith and others of the coming Market and Industrial Revolutions: men tied to other men, men tied to machines, machines tied to clocks, and clocks tied to invisible, pacing bosses supervising factory floors filled with subservient workers executing decentralized, standardized, repeatable tasks intended to lower the cost of labor by removing it of all autonomy, skill and craft.[8]
Furthermore, from a 19th century American perspective, this wage-based work model created a form of dependency that seemed to “contradict the republican principles on which the country had been founded.”
These sentiments, though, were outweighed by those of the Reformation and the Protestant work ethic it produced, a subject which has been studied by countless scholars and was one of the most popular areas of historical study in the first half of the twentieth century. Nearly all agree that out of the Reformation arrived a new approach to work, and a new justification for and acceptance of work as the dominant obligation in life. No longer did we simply work for a “living” – now, we worked for something above and beyond our “daily bread”. We now worked because it was somehow the “right or moral thing to do,” one’s calling from God, even when this work was monotonous, unpleasant, exhausting, or painful.[9]
Though this ethic spread throughout Europe, its primary foothold was in the United States. And though the religious tone of this work ethic faded over the past century, the central themes endured in what Max Weber called “the spirit of capitalism”: work is virtuous. All who can must work. Idleness is bad. To not work is to ignore one’s moral duty. To live off of one’s savings, or the savings of multiple generations of family, is to live the life of a degenerate, socialite playboy, even if one’s lifestyle is modest and use of time noble and selfless.[10]
This shift, in which we now lived to work rather than working to live, in which work was an end rather than a means, didn’t sit well with many workers. In response, they launched a 100-year struggle to progressively shorten the hours of labor and distribute equally the gains attained through technological advancements, either through reduced working hours, increased wages, or a combination of the two.
Fighting About Time
This century-long struggle began at the advent of the Market Revolution in early 19th century antebellum America, an era in which the ancient, long-standing blending of work and life was so suddenly interrupted by the emergence of the “merchant-capitalist” economic system and the new forms of work discipline that came with it. Whereas workdays since time eternal had included a generous blend of nonwork activity (leisurely meals, naps, conversations, trips, social drinking, games, etc.) and the workweek had integrated a variety of accepted breaks (festivals, fairs, celebrations, frolics, wakes), the new, larger-scale “market” enabled by roads, canals, and shipping capabilities resulted in a purge of all non-productive aspects of the workday and workweek, including many of the 156 pre-Reformation religious holidays that had originally come with it.
Workers could sense something was amiss and began to “fight about time.”[11] Beginning with a modest demand for a “TEN HOUR SYSTEM” (the term was normally set in upper-case letters or between quotes in pre-Civil War press), workers simply wanted to regain some measure of control over their lives and re-integrate some of the free associations and activities that had originally been parts of their days. Eventually, the argument expanded and was framed in revolutionary language – only through shorter working hours could working-class citizens actualize the freedoms promised by the Declaration of Independence. Only through freedom from work, in the form of progressively shorter working hours and an increase in leisure, could Americans truly enjoy their “larger liberty”, their “elevated existence”, and their right to pursue happiness.[12]
Alternatively, working 12-, 14-, or 16-hour work days under close supervision in a highly clocked environment with limited social interaction became known as “wage slavery” in the pre-Civil War labor movement press. As stated in The Mechanic,
Social tyranny and oppression [that result from long working hours] are a worse evil for the poor working man to endure than political despotism, because they stare him in the face every day of his existence, grind him into the dust, wither his hopes and happiness of his family, and poison the domestic endearments of his conjugal life.[13]
And as the labor historian Benjamin Hunnicutt summarizes, the “visions that animated the early labor movement were of gradual liberation from the marketplace and of jobs tamed and made subordinate to the more important business of living free – of leisure rather than work as the time to realize human potential.”[14] It was about re-allocating the most basic and precious of human resources, time, away from the new capitalist marketplace and back to the traditional arenas that were losing their face value within the new measurements of economic power and progress: family, community, religion, and civic engagement, among others.
Walt Whitman and many other writers, philosophers and reformers carried the shorter hours movement into the mid-19th century, incorporating the notion of “Higher Progress” as one of its central motivations and ideals. In many ways, though, it was the founding fathers who ordinally communicated the idea of Higher Progress, most notably through the idea of one’s “pursuit of happiness”: where do we go, what do we do, and most importantly how do we live once basic needs, necessities, responsibilities and obligations are met? What sorts of activities and lifestyles and states of being lay beyond necessity and instead are valuable and worthwhile in and of themselves, serving as their own reward?
To answer these sorts of questions, and to realize Higher Progress in America, workers had to first obtain the ability to “sell as much or as little of their own time as they wanted”, to be free of excessive supervision and wage-slavery, and to have “some time each day to call their own.”[15] By the turn of the century, demands for a “ten-hour system” progressed to calls for an eight-hour work day. Henry Ward Beecher, in support of the movement, argued that “there can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.”[16] Henry Ford, in explaining his decision to cut work to five days a week and eight hours a day in his automobile plants, argued more practically that only in leisure could new needs and wants develop, ultimately leading to additional consumption and economic demand, a win-win for workers and the economy alike.
Worker’s calls for shorter hours were not without critics, though. Many influential and educated elite worried that with additional free time, most working-class citizens would degenerate into debauchery and chaos, not the flourishing leisure they espoused. These criticisms were meant with intense hostility and were often compared to the elitist sentiments of those of the antebellum, aristocratic south, who argued that the inborn inferiority and inability of Africans to exercise freedom in full justified their life in bondage.[17]
The task, then, became to differentiate workers’ desire for active, participatory leisure, in its most classic form, from the more modern forms of languishing idleness, a differentiation that was becoming increasingly unclear as the classic definitions of leisure were diluted by modern culture.
As America entered the 20th century, commercial recreation and amusements began to permeate society, offering passive, mostly mindless entertainment to the growing middle class population with disposable income available to spend beyond basic necessities. In contrast to the “ordinary excellence” and do-it-yourself creativity of “democratic artists and artisans” envisioned by supporters of Higher Progress, commercial recreation was creating a society of passive, paying audiences, consumers of information and entertainment in which they previously played an active part.
Leisure, it seemed, was becoming “the test of civilization”. The country could “fail the test by sinking to commercial, passive, meaningless, and solitary amusements.” It could fail the test by ignoring leisure and instead embracing work “as an end instead of a means to life.” Or, it could find its ultimate redemption when “the chasm between the audience and the art is bridged by participation of the people instead of mere spectatorship.”[18]
Before this test could truly be faced, the nation plunged into the Great Depression, which somewhat inadvertently added momentum to the shorter hours movement. Clearly, from the labor perspective, wages had not kept up with productivity, and hours had not reduced fast enough to stimulate adequate demand.[19] To bridge the gap, labor proposed, again, shortening the hours of labor, in this case through “share the work” proposals in which existing employment would be redistributed to more workers working less hours in order to reduce the 25% unemployment rate plaguing society after the stock market crash.
For example, Kellogg’s and Goodyear pivoted from three, 8-hour shifts per day to four, 6-hour shifts, providing work to additional personnel, increasing leisure for existing staff, while maintaining current wages with a guarantee to increase once the economy stabilized. The widespread success of the pilot programs led both outgoing President Hoover and incoming President Roosevelt to support the initiative, paving the way for the 30-hour workweek to become the federal standard and law.
Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, pressure from business leaders and influential advisors pivoted Roosevelt away from the plan, forever changing the direction of America and its relationship with work. The main concerns, it appears, were the threat this arrangement presented not only to the tax base necessary for government growth and spending, but to “the spirit of capitalism” itself.
Human progress and freedom, on the cusp of being re-accepted as the pursuit of happiness on our own time and outside the grips of the marketplace, was instead re-defined as perpetual economic growth, “Full-Time Full-Employment”, and a forever expanding standard of living, regardless of its impact on our families, our communities, our faith, or our environment. To support the unsustainable goal of 40-hours (or more) of work for every working-age American forevermore, the government set the dangerous precedent of accepting immense budget deficits for the sake of “essential” stimulus spending to create new social needs and wants and projects that otherwise would not have existed, such as the Public Works Administration, National Recovery Administration, and the eventual creation of perpetual military mobilizations and the military/industrial complex Eisenhower would soon warn us about.
Instead of solving Keynes’ “economic problem” and tackling our “permanent problem – how to use [our] freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for [us]”, we instead agreed to take on additional economic “problems” into eternity, pursuing endless expansion rather than accepting abundance.
The government ventured down the slippery slope of job creation, serving as an employer of last resort when the private sector couldn’t create enough jobs through the natural laws of supply and demand. And in doing so, it effectively redefined increases in leisure – free time, arguably our most prized possession – “as lost wealth in subsequent measurements of gross national product and then gross domestic product.”[20] Living our lives in perpetual scarcity as loyal consumers awaiting the next best product rather than in collective and individual abundance through frugality, working forever under necessity rather than by free choice, was the new law of the land.
As Higher Progress faded into the background, “Salvation by Work” was born.
- Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge. ↑
- Aristotle, Politics ↑
- Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture ↑
- Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure ↑
- Ibid ↑
- De Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure 27 ↑
- Ibid, 29 ↑
- Ibid ↑
- Ibid 41 ↑
- Ibid ↑
- Free Time, Hunnicutt, 28 ↑
- Ibid, 35 ↑
- The Mechanic, as cited in Free Time (Hunnicutt), 37 ↑
- Free Time, 40 ↑
- Ibid, 7 ↑
- Ibid, 69 ↑
- Hunnicutt, Free Time, 68 ↑
- Walter Lippmann, as quoted in Free Time, 107 ↑
- Free Time, 116 ↑
- Free Time, 120 ↑