Complex Numbers

Leisure Seizure

I distinctly remember, when computers started taking over in the 1970s, predictions of how much less work we'd have to do, how much leisure time we would be granted because of these great labor-saving devices. How we'd be able to devote the extra time to creating poetry, art, philosophy...

    ‘Can I just … rest?’: guilt, the four-day working week and what to do with the fifth day  

Around the world, the four-day week is inching towards grasping distance. For many, I am living the work-life balance dream. Living in some imminent utopian future in which, in return for decades of increasing productivity for relatively little increase in pay and in light of a global epidemic of stress, the four-day work week becomes the next great shift in the way we structure work and leisure.

Except that, from what I've heard, it's a shift from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days.

This is OK, say economists and employers, because actually productivity does not decline when workplaces shift.

Whew. I'm so glad Holy Productivity is safe.

You know what would be utopian? John Maynard Keynes predicted a two-day work week.   Work two days, fish five. For the same standard of living. Like most economists, he was wrong, but it sure did sound good—to everyone, apparently, except the ones getting rich off other peoples' labor, and they're the only ones whose opinion counts.

Because as that fifth day opens up, one starts to feel the weight of its infinite potential and the questions start to pile up. What will you achieve on that fifth day? Can you justify non-work on a weekday? Can you stop work seeping to that day?

Maybe the only thing you need to achieve is non-achievement. Maybe you don't have to justify anything.

Not so long ago, being able to pursue or enjoy leisure for its own sake was a marker of your elevated place in the social hierarchy. Now our busyness, the demands on our time, writes sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, has become a key signifier of social status.

Oh, good, more proof that I'm on the very bottom of the social hierarchy.

Eighty years ago philosopher Bertrand Russell, in calling for a four-hour working day, suggested “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work”.

Work is its own punishment.

I would steadfastly not work-work – take no calls, check no emails – but I could not escape the feeling that I must be accountable for that time. The idea of rest came with a spectre of guilt.

I know this is just one person writing, but to me this sounds like a massive social problem.

A 2019 study, The Rest Test, led by psychologist and BBC radio presenter Claudia Hammond, found that for many people the prospect of resting was associated with anxiety and guilt.

Look, I come from a culture structured around guilt. My mom was a travel agent for guilt trips. No matter what I did as a kid, I was always "supposed" to be doing something else. I grew to hate the concept of guilt.

And so, I planned my day with precision.

In other words, you worked.

For no purpose other than my enjoyment of it. I leave the house and, from exactly 12:15pm to 1:15pm, I go to an exercise class I love.

Why would anyone need another purpose? Well, okay, I almost never do anything for just one reason. Exercise can be enjoyable and good for you.

So can rest.

Yet here we are, in the age of the most magnificent machines. Burnt out.

It could have been different. But social attitudes tend to change slowly, if at all, and there's that continued emphasis on the need to justify your existence by producing something for others.

I'm glad I got off that treadmill. To me, work was always about obtaining sufficient resources for myself that I would never have to work again. Which doesn't mean I never do things considered "work," but I do them on my own terms.

And yes, I know some people find work satisfying and meaningful. I'm not ragging on that at all. People are different. But what this author talks about sounds more like neuroticism than meaning.