In the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s lectures, delivered just after the Second World War, and later published as Leisure: the Basis of Culture, he wrote: ‘there can only be leisure, when man is at one with himself’. 219 We tend to overwork, he pointed out, as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence. Busy-ness, he contended, was the true laziness, a failure to engage fully and responsibly with oneself and the world.
