It’s time to relearn the lost art of leisure – 07/14/2023 – Market

People have dreamed for many years of a world without work. In an essay in 1891, Oscar Wilde envisioned a future where, “just as the trees grow while the countryman sleeps, so while mankind is amusing itself, or enjoying refined leisure—that is man’s aim, not work. – or doing beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply looking at the world with wonder and delight, the machines will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”

This year, rapid developments in artificial intelligence have revived questions about whether machines can one day completely replace the need for human labor. I’m skeptical, not least because we humans have a remarkable ability to find work for ourselves. But let’s assume for a moment that technological progress has ushered in an age of leisure. Would we really be able to handle it?

When John Maynard Keynes speculated about the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren” in 1930, he thought that the end of work as we know it might trigger a collective “nervous breakdown”, saying: “I think with dread of the readjustment of man’s habits and instincts common, created in him by countless generations, which he may have to discard within a few decades”.

Nearly a century later, we don’t seem much closer to adapting to a life of leisure. At least when Keynes wrote, people were gradually moving towards less work in their lives, with steady reductions in weekly working hours from one generation to the next. But this trend stopped in the 1990s: since then, the usual weekly hours for full-time workers average around 40 in OECD countries.

In some industries and countries, workers are still pushing for more leisure time. IG Metall, Germany’s biggest industrial union, is considering advocating for a four-day week for steel workers in its next collective bargaining process in November.

But others seem more committed to the work than ever. A large survey of US workers by the Pew Research Center this year found that 46% do not even take all the paid leave they are entitled to.

The most common reasons cited by workers were that they did not “feel the need” for more time off and feared falling behind. Platforms like the PTO Exchange have sprung up to allow Americans to trade their unused licenses for “other things of value” like retirement funds or student loan payments.

Leisure time has also become, for some, more performative and focused on goals or accomplishments. Races are not just enjoyed, but timed and tracked; books are not only read, but counted and shared on social networks. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in his book “Four Thousand Weeks” [Quatro mil semanas]many people feel a sense of “discomfort with anything that feels too much like a waste of time”.

The hobbies are a little embarrassing, but the “side activities” are cool. He urges readers to dedicate more time to “atelic activities”—which don’t have an end goal and are done just for the fun of it. Inspired, I signed up for a pottery course last year. I tried to tell myself that it was to build character, that I was the worst in the class and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t really making usable pots. But in the end I gave up.

Even doing nothing is now marketed to the anxious or ambitious as a roundabout way to be more productive. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s Excellent Book “Rest” [Descanse], is subtitled “Why You Do More When You Work Less”. A meditation by business consultancy ProNappers reassures listeners that “napping is a great use of your time.”

Is this constant need to enjoy every hour simply human nature? Not necessarily. In the days of cottage industry in England, for example, contemporary accounts suggest that people worked hard but not tirelessly, and traded income for leisure when circumstances allowed. “When knitwear weavers or silk stocking makers charged a lot for their work, they rarely worked on Mondays and Tuesdays, but spent most of their time in the tavern or at the bowling alley,” grumbled John Houghton, a member of the Royal Society, in 1681. “As for shoemakers, they would rather be hanged than not remember Saint Crispin on Monday.”

Perhaps we should start relearning the lost arts of leisure now, rather than waiting for a fully automated future that may never come. As Pang writes, “Rest was never something you do when you’re done with everything else. If you want rest, you have to rest.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves