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In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes hypothesized that modernization would lead to a fifteen-hour workweek and wrung his hands over the prospect of freed-up time, “a fearful problem for the ordinary person with no special talents to occupy himself.”
“what the American people do in their spare time henceforth will largely determine the character of our civilization.”
Any consideration of leisure as a mindset—its definition, conditions, and purpose—is complicated by the history in the United States of the active destruction of anything and everything that many people have needed for wholeness, a sense of agency, and peace of mind.
It responded only with its usual roar—another day, another set of waves.
less visible, more inherently political leisure spaces: churches, kitchens, backyards, union halls, gay bars, community gardens, and activist hubs of all kinds. Sometimes fragile, short-lived, underfunded, and underground, these have been places not just for peace of mind, conviviality, and healing, but also for the building of power—at the very least because their existence is inherently at odds with their surroundings.
Hersey uses social media for work but is critical of the way it encourages a grind culture with historical roots in capitalism and white supremacy.
So I love to think of resting as something that’s subversive and inventive—closing your eyes for 10 minutes, taking a longer time in the shower, daydreaming, meditating, praying.
“The really striking thing is that the most popular forms are still the same as five, six, seven centuries ago: playing certain games, drinking, dancing, simply chatting idly in the shade or by the fire.
Or, as Harvey Keitel’s character in the 1978 film Blue Collar says, “Got a house, fridge, dishwasher, washer-dryer, TV, stereo, motorcycle, car. Buy this shit, buy that shit. All you got’s a bunch of shit.”
In its least useful form, the concept of leisure time reflects an undignified process: working to buy the temporary experience of freedom and then faithfully breathing air in the little gaps that are allowed in the horizontal plane of work.
Barbara Luck’s 1982 poem “The Thing That Is Missed” articulates the absurdity of this “freedom”: The thing that is missed is time without plans, time that invents itself like children with summ...
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on your mark get set go Have FUN-dammit-FUN RUN-dammit-RUN Time’s up. Back on the line. Well did you have fun? Not too much fun? Too hectic? More r...
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According to him, all our problems conceiving of the true nature of time stemmed from wanting to imagine discrete moments sitting side by side in space. He further noted that this “space” was not concrete environmental space, but something purely conceptual:
We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.
Resting here gives us a very different sense of being “on time.” Rather than avatars passing through an empty calendar square, we are actually on top of the material outcome of processes that span millions of years into both the past and the future.
“We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”
that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”
She suggested that it might “give us peace and calm to see that even though our rhythm is interrupted, there is a larger rhythm that continues to go on.”
“But it was not money that the rocks required, it was time,” Kimmerer writes. “And the ‘time is money’ equation doesn’t work in reverse.”
Meditating on the “uniquely human behavior” of ownership, she wonders what the owner sees when he looks at his garden: “Perhaps not beings at all, only works of art as lifeless as the silenced drum in his gallery.”
“Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of the thing,” she writes. If the owner had really loved the mosses, “he would have left them alone and walked each day to see them.”
“Euro-Westerners have come to divide the world into a clear hierarchy of the divine, the human, and nature—from greatest to least, in that order.”
“indigenous thinkers not only acknowledge contingency and human’s lack of control in the world; they also see it as empowering and humbling, not something frightening.”
In other words, We just sell the cigarettes; you’re the ones smoking them.
These days, more and more of us are compelled to seek “flexibility in [our] schedule,” becoming periodic people who must learn the language of fire and flood.
We live according to the sun, not the clock. —Seville woman quoted in the BBC article “Spain Considers Time Zone Change to Boost Productivity,”
You could even imagine creating an arbitrary time familect, like deciding with just one friend to observe some kind of ritual every eight days. Whenever dealing with anyone but each other, of course, you would incur the cost of maintaining a temporal language that ground against the normal seven-day week.
In the United States, the story of DST is rather ridiculous, influenced by that especially American blend of wartime morality and blatant commercial interest. In the surprisingly hilarious book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time,
“the lofty humanitarian goals of Daylight Saving—to get working girls safely home before dark, to reunite dads and moms with the kids before shadows fell on the backyard garden, to safeguard the physical and mental health of industrial workers by increasing their daily opportunity for sports and recreation—also resembled an innovative strategy for boosting retail sales.”
As I told more friends about this story, it became an inside joke, a new familect: Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time.
“Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives,” Oliver Burkeman observes that keeping a detailed log of your time use, in an effort to save time or spend it more wisely, ironically “heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost forever.”
For her, the product offered by a capitalist version of wellness is “the means to remake oneself into an ever more perfect self-correcting machine capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination.”
It requires grasping and playing a different game altogether, one where “winning” means something that previously may have been impossible to articulate.
“You see this goblet? I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines in, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over, my elbow knocks it off the shelf, and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”
