At ease, please: the pleasure of leisure time

There always seems so little of it. But even if we have free time, what should we do with it? By Robert Dessaix

Nobody – or at least nobody we might look up to – seems to know what we should do with our leisure time.

There is disquiet spreading rapidly across the globe about empty time. It’s hardly new: both the Greeks and the Romans were apt to get edgy about it, punishing laziness with death; even ­easeful living struck many Romans of the late republic as a kind of dereliction of duty. All of a sudden, though, there’s a note of panic creeping into our consternation. For a start, why is there so little empty time? We were supposed to be awash in it by now – technology and progressive politics have been promising us freedom from toil for over a century – yet, astonishingly, there’s less of it about than in our grandparents’ day. (Except in Italy, as you’d expect.) Paradoxically, the richer we get, the harder we work and the less time we have to do what we want. What’s gone wrong?

Furthermore, what do we want? When we actually find ourselves with a couple of hours or a week or even the rest of our lives to spend precisely as we please, most of us don’t know what to do with it. Should we log on to Facebook? Watch the Tigers play the Roosters? Keep bees? Fix the fence? Learn Greek? Stay in bed? Nobody – or at least nobody we might look up to – seems to be sure. Once upon a time we had Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes offering us advice, not to mention Jesus and Theodor Adorno, but ­nowadays there’s nobody – or nobody with much authority. Alarm is growing apace.

Certain entrepreneurs are busy finding ways to turn this anxiety into money by medicalising it, by selling us yet more technology, or packaging the emptiness up as tennis lessons, say, or trekking or a massage, and selling it back to us at a profit – most agreeably in many cases. However, when the mass of humanity in economically developed societies does find itself with a free moment or two, it often chooses to sit slumped in front of the television or fiddles with a mobile device. The nobility, needless to say, have never been at a loss for something to do – they gamble, collect art, shoot wild animals, hold charity balls and so on – but their ranks are thinning fast. (The rich, we must remind ourselves, are not the nobility – by and large they’re not even the gentry.)

In brief, it’s high time we faced these two ­critical questions head-on: why, despite all the advances in science and compound interest, in Keynes’ pithy formulation, is there so little free time in our lives (except in Italy) and why, when vacant time does open up for us, are we so clueless about what to do with it? At the heart of both our inability to jump off the treadmill of toil and our bewilderment about what to do next if we do lies confusion, I believe, about the meaning of ­leisure. Does leisure largely mean entertainment? Idleness? Playing sport? Few of us have given it much concentrated thought.

I hadn’t really given the matter much thought myself until, in middle age, I read The Talented Mr Ripley. Early on in Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Tom Ripley, a sexually ambiguous, amoral con artist from Boston becomes a man of leisure (Highsmith’s word, not mine) simply by beating young Dickie Greenleaf to death with an oar in a picturesque Italian setting and embezzling the inheritance.

On reading Highsmith’s novel 20-odd years ago I realised with a start that leisure was something I’d never quite got the hang of. I still regret this, although not bitterly. I was certainly never idle: I knew how to fill vacant time usefully and productively, and did. All my life I’d cared deeply about ideas, skills and causes, playing no games unless forced to, not even Snap, and certainly not cricket. Playing, as I understood it, was something you did on the piano in as accomplished a fashion as possible. I had no hobbies – I’d have been ­horrified that anyone might consider my pastimes “hobbies”, “mindless” preoccupations aimed purely at killing time – and I would be hard-pressed to name any hobbies I have now, despite no longer having any objection to hobbies. Is perusing atlases for fun a “hobby”? It’s about all I’ve got.

The aim of leisure is to make us masters of our own time.

Why there’s less and less time for leisure in advanced economies is fairly clear, I think. There are two principal culprits. Bertrand Russell put his not particularly left-wing finger on the first of them nearly a century ago in his celebrated essay In Praise of Idleness: leisure needs to be shared around. However, 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 all worked less. For its part, socialism in the 20th century eliminated unemployment through a ­system of total work: everyone except the priestly class (the Party) worked full-time all the time at half-speed, enjoying a limited range of state-­approved leisure activities during limited time off. As a result, the masses lived if not wretched then broken-spirited lives, punctuated with outbursts of abandonment. That, at least, is how it worked in Eastern Europe during my time there as a young man. Left-wingers for the most part take themselves so seriously, I find, even when cogitating on leisure: so much false consciousness to correct, so little time. Even Bertrand Russell can be a bit po-faced about fun. Perhaps in Cuba it’s different.

The second culprit is quite simply greed. What both of the dominant political systems in league with the industrial revolution have ­produced is an inordinate lust for more – more possessions, bigger houses, more cars, newer technology, more things. Things can give pleasure, of course (I love my Clarice Cliff vase, my Indonesian ikats, my handmade messmate table), but we’ve gone overboard: as Jerome K. Jerome put it more than a century ago, “We have turned the world into a workshop to provide ourselves with toys”. In other words, to purchase luxury we have sold our ease. Never mind about toys: do not even sell yourself “for the means of life”, Keynes admonished us in his Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, but strive to “keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself”. I doubt many of us these days would even know what he was talking about.

Work, however agreeable, useful or necessary, isessentially a form of servitude. The aim of ­leisure is first and foremost to make us masters of our own time, as one never is when working. But what is leisure? To begin with I was in two minds about one of leisure’s key components: idleness. Is it a virtue or is it a vice? Throughout history the privileged classes have tended to disapprove of idleness among those propping up their privileges. For them idleness has meant sloth. By way of ­contrast, for just as many millennia, some thinkers and writers have called “idleness” in one form or another the highest form of life. For them, all work, even the most pleasurable and useful, is slavery by another name.

At this point in history there is little that can be done immediately about the materialism ­fuelling the general addiction to work, but new ways of thinking about magnifying the time that’s our own should be possible, as should good ways for us to fill it. I began to think about dogs and fecundity. The thing about pack animals such as dogs and humans is that, once they’ve eaten what they killed or rooted about and gathered, or, in the case of humans and domestic animals, somebody else killed or rooted about and gathered, they lie down and have a snooze. Then they commonly engage in a spot of nesting and grooming – patrolling the boundaries, seeing to the bedding, combing out vermin, indulging in a bout or two of foreplay and copulation. And then they play, competitively and for the fun of it, in many cases resorting to a parodic, playful version of the activities that came before the snooze (play fighting, play hunting and so on), but sometimes just frolicking.

Everything they do – we do, you do, I do – after the meal is leisure. It’s otium in Latin, rather than its opposite, negotium. Humans tend to cram all the hunting and gathering (the negotium) into the middle part of their lives, leaving pitifully few years at the end for loafing, nesting and fun – for otium; dogs tend to do no work at all, snooze ­endlessly and play in short bursts.

Leisure, as I see it now, is the word we use in ­English to cover a wide range of loafing, nesting, grooming and play activities, freely chosen purely for the pleasure they afford us, never for material gain, even if they also turn out to be of practical benefit to us and to others. Virtuosity is more important than virtue when we’re at leisure. ­Leisure, wisely chosen, makes even the shortest life deep. At leisure, it transpires, we are at our most intensely and pleasurably human.

Edited extract from The Pleasures of Leisure by Robert Dessaix (Knopf, $29.99), out May 1.