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It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. —BERTRAND RUSSELL, “In Praise of Idleness,” 1932
For generations, we have made ourselves miserable while we’ve worked feverishly. We have driven ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten where we are going, and have lost our capacity for “light-heartedness and play.”
My drive has helped me succeed in life. It sustained me through single parenthood, layoffs, and physical injury. I’ve pushed myself to accomplish incredible amounts of work both at home and in my career. But at some point, drive became inextricably intertwined with dread: dread that all my work and effort would never be enough.
I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits.
Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.
What is the cult of efficiency? It’s a group whose members believe fervently in the virtue of constant activity, in finding the most efficient way to accomplish just about anything and everything. They are busy all the time and they take it on faith that all their effort is saving time and making their lives better. But they’re wrong. The efficiency is an illusion. They believe they’re being efficient when they’re actually wasting time.
The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.
the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something.
Idleness in this sense does not mean inactivity, but instead nonproductive activity.
We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.
What I learned is that if you don’t consciously choose a slower path, you will likely default to the pedal-to-the-metal speeds of modern life.
Everything we think we know about work and efficiency and leisure is relatively recent and very possibly wrong.
WORKING FOR PAY IS a very old concept, but perhaps not as old as you might guess. As recently as 9,000 years ago, humans lived communally on land that was shared, and they harvested crops that fed an entire community.
The first paycheck dates back 5,000 years to a city in what is now Iraq. In exchange for their labor, someone was paid in beer (an ancient Homer Simpson from Mesopotamia, perhaps). Since then, putting in hours in exchange for beer or food or another type of pay has been fairly common all over the world.
Medieval peasants worked, on average, far fewer hours than we do today, and they enjoyed significantly more vacation time.
for most of the 300,000 years (give or take) that Homo sapiens has been walking upright around the world, we did not work forty hours a week, and we certainly didn’t work more than three hundred days a year. Our working habits changed dramatically a little more than two centuries ago.
Going back as far as 4,000 years ago, to the days of ancient Greece, we find that Athenians had up to sixty holidays a year. By the middle of the fourth century BC, there were nearly six months of official festival days, on which no work was done.
medieval peasants worked no more than eight hours a day, sometimes less, and spent at least a third of the year off work, celebrating saints’ days and other special events.
Up until two hundred years ago, we had a lot more time off. In the preindustrial world, work was not the axis around which all life turned.
In the book Life on the English Manor, H. S. Bennett notes that under the feudal system, most serfs owed “day-a-week” dues to their lord. That equals one day’s labor, with work beginning in the morning and lasting until lunch. That’s about six and a half hours during the summer.
Artisans worked about nine hours a day, Bennett found, but worked for themselves, had complete flexibility in their work hours, and kept nearly all of their profits. Farmers tending their own crops worked a little more than eight hours a day.
Until the nineteenth century, working fifty-two weeks a year was nearly unheard o...
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American, the sociologist Juliet Schor
In France, laborers were guaranteed 180 days of rest, and in Spain, workers were entitled to about five months’ respite a year.
When those farmers became factory workers, they lost the variety in their working days and ended up performing the same mindless, monotonous task while standing in the same position for ten to fourteen hours a day.
when labor unions began to form and to press for fewer hours, each worker was fighting not for new protections but, says James E. Thorold Rogers, “to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.” In other words, people wanted to return to the same kind of working habits they had before moving to urban areas and large-scale production lines. Remember this: The fight over working hours has, from the start, been about returning to the kind of life we had for millennia.
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “An Apology for Idlers,” 1877
In truth, your chances of becoming a millionaire in the United States are less than one percent. The likelihood that you’ll become a billionaire is about the same as the chance that you’ll be struck by lightning.
When work is what makes someone worthwhile and deserving, those who don’t work as much as possible are seen as undeserving and worthless.
two things occurred that prevented a drop in working hours: a rise in consumerism and a steep rise in income inequality.
The United States has more private wealth than any other nation in the world, for example, but the fourth highest gap between rich and poor of any country studied by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
This overriding sense that time is scarce and expensive was born when our earnings became dependent on the number of hours we worked.
The United States is the only nation in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) that doesn’t require employers to give paid vacation time to staff.
Repeated studies show that taking time off boosts productivity, creativity, and creative problem-solving. It can even strengthen your immune system, making it less likely that you’ll get sick and be forced to stay home with a cold.
Workaholic should not be a compliment or a humblebrag—it should be a cry for help.
A shortened workweek is something I endorse; torturing every minute in order to make every moment productive is not.
Leisure is not a synonym for inactive. Idleness offers an opportunity for play, something people rarely indulge in these days.
Speed and efficiency are, by their nature, antithetical to introspection and intimacy. The kind of social consciousness required to get to know another person intimately and to understand the emotional landscape of a community requires time and focus, two things most people don’t think they have.
time and focus are essential in our relationships. Scientists have found that in order to understand and empathize with other people, you must be capable of introspection.
the human mind can’t truly do two things at once
What we do is not work on two things at once but rapidly switch from one task to another. That’s our form of “multitasking.”
we are slower at completing tasks when we switch from one activity to another than we are when we simply repeat the same activity. In other words, if you shut down every tab of your browser, mute your phone, and close your email inbox, you’ll finish the memo you’re writing in significantly less time.
For centuries now, the Protestant faith has been among the most vigorous in declaring the virtue of work and the shamefulness of even short periods of idleness. This emphasis has become so embedded in our psyches that research shows emotional trauma caused by unemployment is actually 40 percent more severe among Protestants.
Vincent van Gogh was basically unemployed. He sold only one painting during his lifetime, and yet his lack of financial success never weakened his sense of purpose or dedication to his art.
Aesop got the ant all wrong when he wrote his fable about the grasshopper. In fact, only a small group of ants in the colony did most of the work, while the others hung out and stayed out of the way. Crowding too many ants into the tunnel where they were working impeded progress. In fact, allowing some ants to focus on digging while others were idle accomplished the most while expending the least amount of energy.
Idleness is really time in which one is not actively pursuing a profitable goal. It means you are at leisure.
There is even a good deal of clinical study that suggests idleness is associated with high intelligence. One study at Florida Gulf Coast University discovered a link between a lack of activity and deeper thinkers,
Decades of research demonstrate that we are more creative, more insightful, and generally sharper when we allow ourselves a significant amount of leisure time.
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less
One of the tragic consequences of rising smartphone usage is the death of boredom. In our hours of leisure, we used to experience some measure of ennui from time to time, but we are rarely bored these days, and the younger generation almost doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
