Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

Consider the difference between work-life balance and the notion of leisure outlined by the German-Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his 1948 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. In work, he writes, time is horizontal, a pattern of forward-leaning labor time punctuated by little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work. For Pieper, those little gaps are not leisure. True leisure, instead, exists on a “vertical” axis of time, one whose totality cuts through or negates the entire dimension of workaday time, “run[ning] at right angles to work.” If such moments happen to refresh us for work, that is merely secondary. “Leisure does not exist for the sake of work,” Pieper wrote, “however much strength it may give a man to work; the point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up, whether mental or physical; and though it give new strength, mentally and physically, and spiritually too, that is not the point.” Pieper’s distinction strikes an intuitive chord for me, as it probably does for anyone else who suspects that productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time. To imagine a different “point” means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.