Robert Dessaix pleads for work-life balance in Pleasures of Leisure

Robert Dessaix sees something troubling in the fact increased affluence has not meant more room for relaxation.

Robert Dessaix laments that increased affluence has not meant more room for uncomplicated relaxation.

“Nowadays everyone’s got to appear to be doing something.” So notes Robert Dessaix. Just a memory, it seems, are the days when people could sit in a rocking chair on the veranda and watch the world go by, perhaps while enjoying a contemplative puff of tobacco.

Dessaix, one of our most refined as well as sanest authors, sees something troubling, even unnatural, in the fact increased affluence has not meant more room for uncomplicated relaxation. “Paradoxically, the richer we get, the harder we work and the less time we have to do what we want. What’s gone wrong?”

Rocking chairs are rare these days, as are verandas in the era of high-rise apartments and McMansions. Smoking is being legislated out of existence for cogent public health reasons. Yet at the same time the opportunity in the midst of our busy lives to kick back and enjoy doing nothing also seems to be disappearing.

If a current affairs television show singles out someone apparently doing nothing, then that person is liable to be shamed as a bludger. Dessaix, meanwhile, notes that “the modern capitalist system favours overwork for some and unemployment for others, making everyone miserable to produce what everyone could be happier producing if they worked less”.

MORE: Read an extract from Robert Dessaix’s The Pleasures of Leisure

Socialism, he argues, has proved no more effective in providing everyone with a fulfilling occupation in life, merely employing each person at “half-speed”.

Dessaix, 73, admits being a relative latecomer to the pleasures of leisure, having never been idle in his younger days when, among other things, he was busy learning as many languages as he could handle. The plea he makes in The Pleasures of Leisure is for a return to a sense of balance between work and play.

What follows is an impressive affirmation of Bertrand Russell’s principle that “time we enjoy wasting is not wasted time”. The British philosopher, by the way, was a dedicated pipe smoker.

So much of what passes for recreation is just stress delivered in a different form. Dessaix believes “we’re currently edging back again towards living lives totally consumed by work, seven days a week”. It is not just that modern communications in a tough job market make employees feel they need to be constantly on call. Even when technically we are off duty, it is no longer clear where casual socialising ends and networking begins.

According to Dessaix, “to purchase luxury we have sold our ease”. SUVs ostensibly are leisure vehicles yet function increasingly as an urban status symbol. Even physical exercise has become competitive and materialistic in terms of the clothing and equipment, not just a way of letting off steam and keeping fit. In the view of Dessaix, working out at the gym is less a healthy release of physical energy than the neurotic expression of body anxiety.

According to Dessaix, we live in a world where our lives have to be structured and regulated to be considered meaningful. Even when relaxing, we face pressure to conform and consume. How much of our so-called free time is free? Part of the problem when it comes to enjoying leisure on our own terms is that big government sees non-work time as something to be ritualised and regulated, while the corporations regard it as something to be exploited.

Dessaix writes that these two forces combine most tellingly in mass sporting events, which require expensive taxpayer-funded infrastructure to facilitate a vast commercial spectacle: “Professional sport is never just play. It’s crowd control combined with big business.”

Play of the most carefree kind is something that comes naturally to animals, and we could do worse than learn from the way dogs and cats take delight in simply interacting unselfconsciously with their immediate environment. Throwing a ball for the dog to fetch could be seen as our canine companion’s way of teaching us to get over ourselves for a little while and live in the moment.

Not surprisingly, Dessaix eschews mass enthusiasms such as professional sport in favour of highly personal forms of leisure such as travel, reading, gardening and sex. Leisure could also include collecting, or perhaps just taking a moment to reflect on the things that matter to us: “At leisure, it transpires, we are at our most intensely and pleasurably human.”

Leisure in its purest form might involve simply taking the time to look around, and setting off on a long walk with no fixed destination in mind. Similarly, travel that is self-directed, slow paced and does not entail checking off a list of popular tourist attractions can be as much fun as flitting from this monument to that mountain. As an inveterate traveller, Dessaix recommends staying put in a place for a while rather constantly moving around. He confesses to being more of a tea man than a coffee person.

Perhaps the most gratifying of all forms of leisure — apart from sex and smoking — is reading. Dessaix describes reading as “a brilliant way to do nothing and something at the same time”. Without anyone else even knowing what is happening, we can remake ourselves within the pages of a book. “Reading is like shaking the kaleidoscope of who you are: the shards in there are the same old shards, but something reconfigures them. You feel new, you feel rediscovered.”

Quietly outspoken and as companionable as ever, Dessaix draws freely on literature, film and his own memories, observations and experiences. The Pleasures of Leisure is an excellent discussion of the topic and also an invitation to the reader to indulge gainfully for a couple of hours or so in the activity the book illustrates so entertainingly and recommends with such persuasiveness.

Robert Dessaix is a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, May 22 to 28.

Simon Caterson is an author and critic.

The Pleasures of Leisure

By Robert Dessaix

Knopf, 218pp, $29.99 (HB)