Ideas - Why is it so hard to embrace leisure time?

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

With a to-do list that requires 30 hours in a day to complete, leisure time often gets erased. IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa explores a better time, when there was space for ourselves to pursue activities we value. What it comes down to is reconfiguring our relationship to the time we have and opening it up so we can pursue the good life. *Originally aired on February 20, 2020.

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Find the latest season wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Ideas. Ideas. Radio for the mind. Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying, Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do. I'm Nala Ayyad, welcome to ideas. Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell did work hard. He wrote 60 books, thousands of articles, was a mathematician, social critic, and a Nobel laureate. But in 1932, nearly 90 years ago, he wrote this essay called In Praise of Idleness. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a good thing, great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. In our modern world, technology was supposed to save us. It was going to make our jobs so efficient that we'd have all kinds of time to pursue the things we really value. Yet here we all are,

exhausted or burnt out and wishing we had just a few more hours to get it all done. We're left angry at our jobs and resentful about the unfilled promise of leisure. In this episode, we're calling The Death of Leisure. Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa asks one central question. Why is it so hard to embrace leisure? She remembers a better time and thinks we can find our way there again. Leisure may be dead, but long, When I was a child.

When I was a child, my favorite thing to do was to imagine the life of a grown-up. I didn't dream of driving or wearing makeup or having lots of money. For me, being an adult meant doing what I wanted, a life free from compulsion. So here I am, an actual adult. and my entire existence is a giant to-do list. It really wasn't supposed to be this way. What happened to the hours I was supposed to spend reading books and writing beautiful things and knitting fabulous and complicated sweaters

for my admiring family and friends? I just seem to be running from one task to the next. At the same time, I feel guilty for thinking about my lack of leisure when really my life is fine. This feels like a very middle-class problem. And it's not as though I don't have choices, I do. But choices that privilege leisure over productive work always leave me scolding myself. How dare I? I should be working. Everyone else is working. Who do I think I am?

Leisure is a reward for a job well done, I tell myself. But the job is never done. So I'm going to do the thing I do whenever a problem preoccupies my mind. Ask a bunch of smart people what they think. And with any luck, figure out how to disentangle my aspiration for more leisure. from what it means to be truly productive instead of just being busy. There's a lot of conversation these days happening about flow and working in the zone. And I actually have these sort of nostalgic impressions of intensely productive times in my past, especially when I was working primarily as a writer. Do you have a productivity memory?

Well, I mean, the kind of the peak or the one I most often go back to is a period of, well, during my entire 20s, where I was based in Afghanistan and I was busy with a whole bunch of different projects and books and finishing my PhD and just involved in all sorts of things, not to mention just the realities of doing research in Afghanistan and doing, doing that work. And for me, there's a bunch of elements that kind of go into what made that so such a kind of a sweet period for productivity, most prominent of which was the fact that very often we didn't really have any access to the internet. This is my colleague and I. My name is Alex Strick van Linschrotten and I am a writer, a researcher based in Pakistan. We would simply just be forced to exist off, you know, whatever we had saved to our laptops and or whatever kind of paper books and so on we had with us. We were working on some history writing and some research work at the time. And that was actually surprisingly good as a setup, you know,

in terms of forcing you to actually do the work of thinking rather than the work of looking more things up or gathering more information or all of these kinds of things. And we were were actually one of the first people to get a Kindle electronic book reader. And we had actually a Canadian journalist, a mutual friend Graham Smith. He smuggled a very early version of the Kindle e-book reader to my colleague and myself in Kandahar, where suddenly we had access to all of these books that previously we would have had to, you know, make a return trip to Europe in order to buy those books. But yeah, I wrote, wrote three books during this time and laid the seeds for all sorts of other research projects and interests. Yeah, it was certainly a kind of a peak period

in terms of my productivity. It made certain pieces of our research work easier. And it's not like we had a streaming device which allowed us to watch YouTube videos or whatever. It was still we had access to more books. And books are a slow medium, I guess, where in terms of just consuming the information, that's a fairly slow process. and it doesn't in and of itself require you to be flipping between lots of different things and your attention constantly flitting from one thing to the other. So in that sense, it didn't detract from this, you know, Kandahar state that we were in where we had very little contact and connection to the outside world.

In fact, even, you know, we had this old internet connection where, to start with, we had, I think, a couple of hours electricity every two or three days. And then while that two or three hour period happened, we had maybe half an hour of internet time during which, you know, you would download all of your emails to be replied to over the next few days and then synced up once you next had the internet connection. And I seem to remember if one of us wanted to download a song or a piece of music or something like this, you know, that would sometimes have to be straddled over four or five different internet sessions. just for one song. So, yeah, everything was slower. I like that you refer to this time as Kandahar State, like a Kandahar state of mind.

And that's an interesting thing at that point that you made about consuming books as a slow medium. And sometimes I wonder if the challenge here isn't so much. I mean, the challenge here is really one of perception in many ways, right? That what we're consuming is so fast and it speeds up the time that we're in. And it makes everything feel more urgent. So possibly one of the challenges, in this question that I'm asking about, how do we own our time, is really one of what is it that we're doing with the time we have

that lends itself to this idea that we don't have any? Yeah. And I think, you know, the media and the ways of which we interact with information, a lot of this is designed to give that speed and to kind of keep you moving, to keep you scrolling, to keep passing through things. And, you know, it's extremely difficult to exist in that world, in that universe and not follow that pace and that speed. And in fact, my wife is often very amused whenever something happens, which is kind of roughly approximates this kind of our experience, whenever our power goes, whenever, you know, a shark bites through the internet cables that connect to South Asia and turn everything off for a week.

I'll suddenly rejoice and I'll say, finally, I can get some work done. And, you know, I'm often actively doing this to myself in terms of like turning off my internet connection and so on to try and recreate that experience because so many of the tools and the environments which exist now, just it's impossible to retain that slow state and be in them with any kind of deliberateness. The most productive people practice ruthless acts of isolation in order to have that productivity remain a reality. My name is Anne Helen Peterson, and I am a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News. To understand why leisure can be so hard, we need to first look at our relationship to productivity. Our jobs used to be time-bound. Even if we work long shifts, work started, and work ended.

There was a space for work and a space for rest. Today, work bleeds into all our time. So for me, that meant, you know, canceling on plans with friends all the time. I was still a good partner. Like, that was really important to me. And I think I could maintain that because my partner lived in the same home as me. And I was a good dog owner. And I was kind to my body in terms of exercising.

but I think, you know, one of the things about exercise is you can reframe it as productive and as turning yourself, transforming yourself into an optimized human, which is part of this larger task. But then there are all of these other things just related to overall mental health that because they couldn't be slotted into productivity went by the wayside. So a lot of that from basically my early 20s was getting rid of any sort of leisure or hobby that couldn't be constructed like exercise as as part of my productive mindset. This idea of isolation that you've referred to, I always find it really interesting that we culturally have come to really respect isolation in that way.

I mean, Thoreau, you know, for the idea that, you know, he was able to sort of hold himself up in this, in this cabin and be productive in the way that he was and thinking about big ideas and how that was aspirational in so many ways. But the amount of labor that went into him being isolated that was done by others remains hidden. And so we take it up as kind of this aspirational myth, you know, something that we can do possibly when we've done the work, right? When we're rewarded for the hard work that we've done, we can also isolate ourselves in some cabin in the woods and write about important things. And I think that that's part of the problem. Like I think it's part of the it's part of the way that we've come to understand what

what hard work and good work looks like. Well, and the most venerated forms of productivity are often facilitated by women, right? So whether that's wives taking care of children or mothers in the case of throw like doing your laundry or historically, you know, a lot of businessmen, their productivity and the fact that they could get their work done, you know, swiftly, efficiently, all these sorts of things, was because they weren't doing the work that was performed by their secretaries. And I think now part of what overwhelms us, overwhelms men and women, is that you're doing all that work without a help mate and come to resent it as well. You wrote a lengthy essay about burnout, and you've talked about your own process of understanding

why you couldn't get things done. Can you tell me about what was happening to you at the time? You know, I'd describe it as like a big flatness. I felt like there was nothing that excited me about the work that I wanted to do. But then I also felt like this productive engine that had powered me for my adult life had just kind of faltered. Like I didn't want to get the stuff done on my to do list or more accurately. I felt like I just couldn't do it. And I think there's some overlap with symptoms of, you know, what's described as depression. But I think burnout was a more accurate description of what was going on, especially given what had happened to me over the last couple of years of my work life. So tell me about that. What was happening? Well, I think as soon as I started graduate school, I started thinking that I needed to work all the time, that it was the only way to succeed was to make any sort of time in any day,

you know, whether it was the weekday or the weekend, available for working. And that's when I started this philosophy that I think of as like everything good is bad and everything bad is good. So all the things that used to make me feel good, so like leisure broadly or not working, I honestly thought of those things as bad because it wasn't working. And then all the things that felt bad, aka working all the time, I thought, well, that's good because at least I'm working. It's a really messed up way to code the way that you spend time in your mind. And from graduate school, so I was in graduate school for six years, and then I was an academic, and then I was a journalist. And all of those things made me conceive of more work as always good. And I think that I just ran into this wall of diminishing returns. And then also just like at some point you can't work all the time anymore. You just can't. So a lot of people will recognize that in themselves. But there's something that you say that's specific in terms of a generational thing. So I just want to read you this thing that you wrote. You said it's not a temporary affliction. It's the millennial condition. It's our base temperature. It's our background music. It's the way things are. It's our lives. And so I think it's important for people to also understand that this isn't a productivity thing that you're talking about, that you were struggling to manage your time and get. get things done in a timely fashion?

No, not at all. No, I'm very productive. It was more that I had been productive for so long that it just, everything felt like a to-do list. So just like endlessly recycling myself. So whether that was going on vacation or hanging out outside or doing my actual work or doing errands, it all flattened itself into just another thing to get done on that to-do list. And so nothing felt great and nothing felt horrible. It was just, again, this

flattening. And the thing about the burnout is that, you know, I said earlier that like you can't work all the time, but really you can't. Like, you just keep doing it. There's no breakdown. There's no catharsis that often comes with a breakdown or with exhaustion and collapse. You reach the point of exhaustion and then you just keep going. And so what is it specifically about the millennial generation? do you think, that this has become a chronic condition of a particular generation, as opposed to individuals who have found themselves pulled into this thing that they can't undo or they can't stop?

What I'm trying to describe when I talk about it as the millennial condition is that all of these factors that have really exacerbated burnout and made it into, you know, a foundational part of our experience, they really coalesce around millennials specifically. So the three that I think of are graduating from high school or college or graduate school directly into the global recession, which really changes our relationship with work and employment, just in general, and just a lot of fear, intention and precarity around jobs, combined with massive amounts of student debt, which, again, really changes the way that you navigate your day to day and also the way that you conceive of work and your future and what's available to you in terms of, of, you know, can I ever purchase a home? And then the third is our relationship with digital technologies. So I'm an elder millennial, which means that I was born in 1981. So I remember a time before my entire life was mediated by my phone.

But the youngest millennials, you know, that's not really a reality. Like they do not know a social life without Instagram. They do not know a way of communicating before texts in an email. Or, you know, they have very vague memories. of it. I'm older than you are. And so the bulk of my growing up, it was done essentially in an analog kind of way. And one of the things that I feel is that even everyday life feels fast. It's not that I'm necessarily busier than I've ever been. I just feel busier because everything has to happen at this rushed pace. And so I, you know, I always think

about how I'll go on Instagram and I'll be like, you know, it's just killing time, right? like I'm waiting on, yeah, I'm waiting on the bus or I'm, I'm in between stuff and just kind of go on there. And I'll find myself just like, like, serial liking, and am I even looking, right? Like, am I even enjoying? I'm just, it's kind of this serial liking, like scrolling and liking and scrolling and liking. And it feels like a very fast experience, even though what it actually is is supposed to be enjoyment. And then I kind of think of it as, you know, tech has kind of created this sort of enjoyment as task. where even if it's, you know, intellectually understand this is just something me doing on my down time, it feels like work because it's almost like how quickly can I get through this?

Yeah. And I think the other thing about something like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter is that we use them in these sort of interstitials of our lives that used to be actual rest for our brains, right? So if you were raiding in line at the grocery store or you were walking down, you know, a couple blocks down. the street, you just hung out with your own mind and actually had, you know, what is considered solitude, which is freedom from other people's minds in some way, right? And now you're consumed with looking at your phone in some capacity, whether it's Instagram or responding to text, whatever, but it doesn't ever feel like a choice, right? It doesn't feel like you are choosing your choice. It feels like a compulsion or a habit that doesn't feel restorative and any form. And there are a lot of things about like the actual design of these apps that pull us

back. So one of the ones that is most interesting to me is that, you know, in the nascent stages of a lot of these apps, they developed this pull to refresh capacity. So, you know, you pull it like a slot machine in order to refresh it and get more. And so what that creates is this feeling that there is always more for you to pull, right? There's always more for you to see. Instead of, And, again, I think you can remember what, like, Facebook was like before the never-ending feed. Yeah. You'd look at maybe, you'd look for five minutes and then you'd be done. And but that wasn't good for the apps, right?

Like, they needed constant re-engagement. And so they've created these things, whether it's notifications or the pull, the refresh, that pull us back in. And so, again, it doesn't feel like a choice. It doesn't feel like something that we are doing because we want to be doing it. It seems like something that just starts. happening, which is why it feels so empty, I think. My name is Bridget Schulte, and I'm a long-time journalist. I wrote a book called Overwhelmed, Work, Love, and Play when no one has the time.

And now I'm the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, where I'm working to try to solve all the problems about work life and gender equality that I wrote about in my book. And how's that going? Well, my goal is to put myself out of business, and I still have a lot of work to do. So tell me about your book. So overwhelmed. It really kind of started with my own personal journey. It was really an accidental book.

I was working full time as a newspaper reporter at the Washington Post. I had two small kids. I felt like my hair was on fire. I just never had time for anything. I was getting maybe five hours of sleep a night. And I just was constantly on the go. And I felt totally inadequate at work. I felt totally inadequate as a mother at home.

And everybody that I talked to, my friends, my sister, everybody felt like it was the same. And I thought, well, this is just the way life is. These are the choices that I've made to be a working mother. And this is what I've just got to put up with. And then this time use researcher told me that, like, all women, I had 30 hours of leisure a week. And I just about lost my mind. I'm like, where? No kidding.

Where are those 30 hours of leisure? And I said, you know, I don't have 30 hours of leisure. And he said, yes, you do. Come and do a time study with me. I will show you where your leisure is. And so all of this, the book really began with this very detailed, fine-grained look at my own life and time, and then going and talking to this time use researcher and just realizing that we were talking two very different languages.

And the book became this journey to try to understand, well, why is life? Why does it feel so crazy? And it starts with the perspective as my perspective or my experience as a working mother, but it really broadens out because there's so many people who feel that wife, who feel overwhelmed. And when I read a magazine story to begin with, the response was just, it was overwhelming to, no pun intended. But it was from, you know, people who had kids, people who didn't have kids, people who, you know, were single or older or younger. And so many of them said, you know, you climbed into my head and you wrote about my life. And at that point, I just thought, there's something bigger than a series of personal

choices or a series of like individual failures because we were all feeling like failures. And at that point, I really wanted to understand what's going on in a larger sense that could lead to these kinds of feelings. And more than that, really use my skills as a reporter to really try to understand, could it be any different? Could it be better? And where and how and why? Well, I want to pick up on something that you just mentioned about your conception of leisure was very different from what this researcher was talking about. And that's one of the challenges that academics and researchers will use these terms in ways that the average person doesn't. And so when we talk about leisure, for some people, that means non-paid work that has some sort of

social benefit. For others, it may mean things that relax them. For others, it may actually just mean idle time, which they find productive and useful in other ways. And so when you were thinking about leisure in your own life versus how this researcher was thinking about leisure. Tell me about that tension there. What was the difference between how you were thinking about it and what he was telling you was actually the reality of your life, which you obviously didn't agree with? No, it's so funny looking back at that, you know, because I like this guy very much. He since passed on, but he, you know, he just had a certain kind of old school academic air. And so in his view, could be categorized into 11 different activities and then anything that didn't fit in those particular

you know time-bounded activities or very definite activities like personal care sleep work commuting time then that sort of he bundled all of that into leisure and what I would say that's really what I would call residual time there's a lot of like 10 minutes here 20 minutes here you know in between time kind of between the the end of one thing in the beginning of another, that just isn't, I would not call that leisure time. I would call that kind of garbage time, frankly. So a lot of that is what he added up to. He said I had something like 27 hours of leisure and I called it like bits and scraps of garbage. So what I was thinking about at the time, when I was thinking, well, what would leisure feel like

as this completely crazed, time-starved human being? Honest to God, when I fantasized about leisure I was fantasizing about a sick day where I didn't have to do anything where I had the permission because I was sick to like maybe read a book or like not have to like you know sometimes if you're home or you have a day off then you look around and it's like oh I really should clean out that closet oh man this junk drawer is like I can't close it I really should do that there's a million things that you can and should and probably ought to do and so for for me I guess it was the that sense of permission for either idleness or just rest that came from a sick day. But the one thing that I discovered in talking to so many leisure researchers that was so

interesting is that leisure is a lot like beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder. It's not going to be the same for anybody because it's really about how it feels. It's about how it feels to you as you're living through that moment. So if somebody loves to garden, that's leisure time. If you hate gardening, that's drudgery, that's housework. And maybe at one point in your life, a certain thing would be leisure at another time it wouldn't be. So it's almost like to experience leisure time requires a little bit of work on our own parts

to figure out what it is we need or want and then to give ourselves permission to actually have that kind of space and have that feeling, whatever that is that we're seeking, in that space of time. One of the leisure researchers I spoke with, his name is Ben Honeycutt in Iowa, and I love this. He just, he said, leisure is that place where we can become most fully human. And I love that, you know, and so sometimes when we take our lists and our checklists and our do-does and our, you know, that, that air that we must be productive all the time when we, when we move that into the leisure space, we're actually robbing ourselves of the benefits of what that kind of unbounded time could really be.

You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, in North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on RN and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also stream us or get our podcast on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayed. a place which is a country and a nation. Is that what you spent the whole day doing, Chris? I'm trying to make a grand statement. It's not working, is it?

Hi, I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Neil Cook. I'll listen, you can relax, Chris. As it happens, in case you've forgotten, has been on for more than 50 years. That is true. And you and I will be away for a part of this summer. But as it happens, we'll still be on with some fantastic guest hosts filling in. And the show will still be sharing stories from Canada and the rest of the world.

You can listen to As It Happens. wherever you get your podcasts. Leisure, or rather the lack of it, is deeply intertwined with work. The virtual disappearance of leisure in our society isn't merely a byproduct of poor time management on our part. It's the outcome of a system, one that's designed to keep us working

and preoccupied by work when we're not. In this episode, we're calling the death of leisure. Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa asks, if it's possible to rethink the place of leisure in our lives. Can leisure be reimagined, not as time off work, but as a value to pursue for its own sake, is it possible for us to take time back for ourselves? How is your relationship to this question of owning your own time shifted

in the time that you think back to that nostalgic candlestical, to our state and and what you're doing today. How we relate to time is very much connected to our sense of self and our identity. And as that changes, you know, or as our ability to make or do more with those seconds or hours in our life, that can cause quite important or profound shifts in our identity. And, I mean, the most clear example for that for me in my life was a period of a few years where I was fairly sick in a chronic sense, not in an acute sense, the sense of needing to be in a hospital and it's kind of pain stuff going on. And this quite seriously affected my ability to live in that space, either mental or temporal, where I was producing things and active and busy

and where my mind was able to dictate where my body went. There it kind of very much switched over and switched ground. And my body was in the driving seat, whether or not I wanted to respond to that. And yeah, that was, I suddenly remember, a lot of mental and kind of emotional resistance to this idea that this had changed, somehow. And a lot of that had to do with, yeah, my relationship with time and the extent to which I could

push through things, the extent to which I could spend long amounts of time working versus needing to take breaks. And again, yeah, going back to this idea that, you know, in certain conceptions and certain in this kind of productivity space, the idea that, you know, self-care or taking time for yourself is somehow seen as weakness or as something which isn't productivity. You know, it's the time in between you doing productive things. And I think that period forced me to, yeah, to kind of rethink that in a little bit of the way. Just as, you know, in the cliche that the beats in between the notes in music are just as important as the notes themselves. Yes, it's a kind of a similar thing going on there.

One of the problems that I think millennials in particular face is that because we are optimized as many adults trying to get into college, you know, just our lives become college resumes, especially bourgeois middle class millennials. There is a point where there was nothing that you were encouraged to do if it wasn't, you know, worthy of your resume in some way. And so it's difficult to remember the things that maybe you like to do because there were things that you ought to do or things that you must do or things that the fun part of it was evacuated by becoming formalized in some way, you know, whether basketball became something that you played in leagues and on club teams and competitively instead of just playing basketball with friends for no reason other than because you liked it. And so I think that a lot of people never necessarily developed actual hobbies or actual leisure activities or if they acquired them later in life, it was very superficially as something to like Instagram about. And so there's not actually a deep investment or like you don't actually like it for any other reason other than you like being able to post on Instagram that you are the sort of person who does this activity. And so for me, I think of my hobbies as things that I really have done since I was young and that I didn't do for probably about 12, 15 years. And I'm returning to those things.

And I think, you know, if we're talking about how to live the good life, you know, part of it is study after study has shown that like doing things with others, doing things with your family and then doing things for others makes you happier. We know this. All of us have read these studies. But at the same time, we resist that over and over again because the imperative, both financial and societal, is to work instead. In Western economies, particularly I'm thinking of the United States, you know, we are very much the products of our environment. And the way we think and our attitudes and our behaviors

are very much driven by kind of what our larger social or cultural norms are. And when you live in a society that values productivity, that talks all the time about, you know, being identified with work and what did you do today? What do you do? It's very difficult to get out of that kind of productivity mindset when we think about other kinds of time. You know, the Greeks had two ways of describing time. And one, they called chronos time. And that's the time that we experience. It's linear. It's moment to moment. It's, you know, you think about chronos. It's the time of the clock and I'm late. I'm early. But there was this other kind of time that they described. They called it Cairo's time. And it's the time of the eternal present. And when you think about it, that really is the only place that we ever live. Human beings live, we live moment to moment to moment. So the chronos time gives you a sense of how the moments string together. But our experience of time is always now. And that's sort of the beauty of flow is getting into that really connecting with that spirit of the nowness of whatever it is you're doing or not doing.

My name is Alex Sager, and I'm a associate professor of philosophy at Portland State University. I actually think it's unfortunate that more philosophers aren't writing about leisure because leisure is really, it's what you do when you're freed from necessity. It's when you are doing things that you consider to be really important in themselves. And I'd like to sometimes think about what if we took our society? And instead of structuring it around work, we thought instead, how would you structure a society around leisure? And I think that raises a lot of really kind of fundamental questions about things like education, about the structure of the workplace, and about the structure of our political institutions. So talk to me a little bit more about that. What, if I were to say to you, sketch out a day in the life of, what would that life look like if it was one that was fundamentally built around leisure first?

Well, I think, you know, when you talk to people, often, you know, the first question you ask is, you know, what do you do? And, you know, what people are looking for for an answer is what is your job? What are you paid to do? And, you know, I think often that the assumption is work is something you only do because you need to do it. It's necessary to survive. Now, I think if we started to think about this from the perspective of leisure instead of work, you know, I think the first thing we would ask is, is the work we're doing genuinely valuable? You know, is it something that we think contributes to making people's lives better or enriching our lives?

And, you know, I think we'd think very, very carefully about how we spend our day. I think there's a misconception. I think often leisure is thought of as rest. It's something you do or you don't do. It's idleness or rest or laziness. And I think leisure should really be understood as what you do when you really have a choice. And when you start kind of applying that view to your day, I think it's going to change very much, you know, how you relate with others, how you break up your time, how you focus in your school. and your work and things like that, I think it would be pretty different.

Well, leisure is often taken up as a luxury, right? Like, it's a sign of success that when one can afford to not be at work, one can be at leisure. And so we've decided that the idea of leisure first in a way sounds, I mean, it sounds very aristocratic, frankly. I mean, to think of it in those terms, but what you're really talking about is how do we think about the things that we value? And so how do you respond to this idea that leisure is something that we can do when work is done? I think you says something very important. I mean, leisure, at least in the philosophical tradition, it is an aristocratic notion. If we go back to the ancient Greece, we look at somebody like Aristotle.

And it's interesting because the ancient Greeks defined work as the lack of leisure. So leisure was actually the dominant term. And then to not have leisure was considered to be, well, it was considered to be the state of a slave. And these were slave-owning societies in which a lot of the labor was done. It was compulsory labor. So I think there is a really kind of strong, aristocratic sense in that, but I'm a political philosopher and we spent a lot of time trying to think about how the world should be or could

be. And, you know, I think one thing, it's kind of a major question in social justice, is how could we generalize, you know, this freedom so more people would be able, you know, to make it primary in their lives? Well, that is part of the challenge. I mean, in doing this episode, you know, and thinking about the problem of how to come at a place where one can find a place for leisure, we end up talking a lot about work and about capitalism. And so one of the challenges, of course, is that the idea of the amount of work that needs to be done in order to make life livable has to be done by someone. And that work is often taken up by, you know, it's taken up by women, when we're talking

about the domestic sphere, for example, or it's taken up by poor people, helping to make rich people's lives more comfortable. And so how are we meant to then think about what leisure for all looks like when our society is structured around this idea that that work is for some and leisure is for others? I think those are really good questions and really hard questions. I guess what I would say is, you know, what's really, I think, key here is compulsion. I mean, you're absolutely right. A lot of people are compelled to work. And it's very inequitable, who is compelled to work and who has luxury to choose what they

want to do. At the same time, I would suggest that even necessary work can be leisurely, maybe not in our society, but at least, you know, in a more equitable society. And just, you know, to give an example, you know, many of us we don't like to do a household to hold chores. You know, we'd rather not have to wash our clothes or sweep the floors or do the dishes. But, you know, at the same time, you can do that sort of work in a way that if you value it, if it's for your home, for your environment, it's, it can be done in a way that I think is compatible with leisure because you're not being compelled by others to do it, but rather it's something you choose to do. And I also think there are a lot of jobs.

I used to work in construction, you know, in the summers. And, you know, I noticed at the time that it made an enormous difference, you know, who you were working with and, you know, what sort of boss you had. And, you know, construction, pouring concrete, what I did one summer, it wasn't really how I wanted to spend my life. But I will say that, you know, I felt that I was contributing something through that work. I was doing something important. I was laying the foundation for somebody's house.

And I think a lot of work, you know, if we restructured society, so there isn't this compulsion by economic need or by patriarchy or by other people forcing to do it, but if you're able to choose to do it because you value it, that makes a real difference. And I think that sort of work actually is compatible with leisure. Leisure understood broadly is it's a huge part of our lives. It's part of our social lives. It's part of our political lives. I think that's something that often gets overlooked. One of the things that Aristotle pointed out is that politics depends on leisure. You know, you can't have politics unless there are people who are free to reflect on what they actually want for their society.

I think something else that's, I wouldn't say urgent, but that's, I think, really, remarkable about this time is we really have an opportunity to move toward more of a society that focuses on leisure. You know, this is being predicted for over 100 years, you know, the idea that, you know, eventually people will be working a 15-hour work week. John Maynard Keynes predicted this, but you also see this in people like Bertrand Russell. And I think, you know, more than ever, there actually is the possibility. there's the economic efficiency there that people could work a lot less, at least in terms

of compulsory work. And I think what we've done and we've seen over and over again is that employers have created jobs that often don't seem to be doing anything or they're jobs that seem to actually be making people's lives harder rather than easier or it seems to be busy work. And, you know, I think there's a tremendous opportunity to think. You know, we have all this technology. The wealth, of course, is grossly misdistributed. It's grossly unequal.

But nonetheless, you know, there is the wealth and there's the capacity for people to work less. And, you know, I think this is a time we could sort of seize, you know, the abundance and say, well, we have the abundance. We could do less, at least in terms of compelled work. How would we like to think of a society that is structured around this? Leisure has always been throughout history the provenance of privileged men. You know, when you look at the classic written about leisure, it's by Thorsten Veblen, you know, the theory of the leisure class, wrote it in the, you know, 19th century. And he wrote, like on page two, he said leisure has always been, you know,

something that high class or high status men have had access to. And everybody else did all the work. You know, he said all the drudge work was done by the servants, the slaves, comma, and also all the women. So I think what's really important and also all the women. So I think what's very important to understand is that women in particular have never had a history or culture or expectation of leisure. I mean, think about even the, you know, kind of the famous adages, you know, like women, you know, from sun up to sundown or woman's work is never done, you know, and the best women were always busy and bustling around, you know, even on Sunday, you know, they're making the huge meal and then they're ironing and they're, you know, they're taking care of everybody else. They're taking people's emotional temperature. They're doing mental work if they're not only doing physical work. So women have always had this kind of expectation of, kin work, care work, and frankly, never-ending work. I think that's one of the reasons why there's so much guilt around leisure for women or guilt that they don't deserve it.

And this was so interesting. So part of what I also came across, these wonderful researchers that look at the gender aspect of leisure, feminist leisure researchers. And one of the things that they've found did this fascinating study, and they talked to women all around the world, and it didn't matter. their culture or their background, their age, their ethnicity, religion, whatever, that typically women felt that they did not deserve leisure time. Whereas men do, particularly high status men. It's like, yeah, sure, I'm going to go down to the pub with my friends. Or yeah,

I'm going to go play golf all Saturday. Of course, I worked hard. I deserved this. Women didn't have that sense of deserving, even if they had worked like a full week or they'd done all sorts of housekeeping and, you know, taking care of family. That's a full-time job. So they felt they didn't deserve leisure, and the only way they could actually get to having that kind of time is if they earned it. And the only way to earn it was to get to the end of their really long to-do list, which if your to-do list looks anything like mine, it will never end. We will die, and we will have emails in our inbox, and we will have stuff to do on our to-do list. So that women in particular have a very difficult time making space, giving themselves permission, and feeling like there's permission. mission and the culture around them to have leisure time.

Yeah, I always think about the cultivation of the five-day work week, which was at the time, you know, it was an accomplishment because before it was the six-day work week or the six-and-a-half day work week. And it was union leaders and different people advocating that under capitalism, you know, if we make our productivity go up, like, why do we need to work all the time? It's more humane. And now as productivity continues to go up, there are people who are advocating for a four-day work week. And part of the reasoning is that right now, think of how like you think of the weekend. At least how I think of the weekend is like Saturday is ketchup day. And then Sunday you have this time that's like, oh, finally I get to relax. And this is why people get what's

called the Sunday scleries because as soon as that relaxation day starts, you are cognizant the fact that it's going to end very quickly. And so it's not enough time to actually relax or restore or even make time for leisure in some way. Because, again, people, they're so cognizant of how little time that they have that it feels like I can't commit to anything. You know, I can't go and do this volunteer work on one of those days. They're so precious to me and so necessary. And so what places that have instituted a four-day work week have found is that people make an incredibly, you know, I don't want to use the word productive, but a really interesting use of that extra day, of that third day of the weekend. And whether that's, you know, there are grandparents who like really dedicate it to spending time with their grandkids because they can take, you know, a day of child care off of the parent in that scenario.

Or there are people who are like, well, every Friday, this is just, I volunteer every Friday now. Or they use it for something, you know, a hobby or a leisure activity that has always been something that they did maybe once a year, right? But now they actually get to feel dedicated and devoted and immersed in it. And I think it radically changes people's investment in themselves and their families, but also in society. You know, we have these declining rates of participation in government, in government volunteerism, in just volunteerism in general. Like in America, there is problems right now finding enough volunteers to staff the volunteer firefighters that take care of more rural areas or with like the volunteer committees that

help bolster smaller governments in smaller towns. They just can't find people who can make that commitment. And I don't think it's that we're more selfish. I think that we don't have an adequate amount of space to feel like we can dedicate ourselves. I mean, at the end of the day, the question then becomes this question of the good life, of this ability to think about the place of leisure. So after having written this essay and thought about this problem and you're working on a book as well, where have you come to that's different, do you think, from where you started out? pretty firm in the idea that it doesn't have to be this way. And right now, to me, that feels really powerful.

I think as individuals, the big thing that we need to come together in solidarity about, whether as millennials or just as workers under capitalism, is that it doesn't have to be this way. It can be different. And, you know, our recent past is proof that it can be different. and then I think our future can also be proof. I've found the idea that the way time is passing and constantly vanishing and constantly,

it's kind of something on the horizon which is always slightly out of reach but just constantly moving forward and there's this kind of slow trudge in its path. This is something which I find gives me at least a lot of meaning. And, you know, at the end of this, you have the idea of death, which for me, yeah, the idea that there's an end to this

and that eventually all of this stuff runs out and that there are only so many days left and this ultimately for me I find like quite enlivening or yeah, meaning imparting somehow. I think that's a much more useful and an enjoyable way actually. And people don't often consider, you know, thinking about death and enjoyment in the same breath. But for me, they're kind of part and parcel of the same thing. And I think there's also maybe a parallel in my Kandahar experience where, so, you know, we would be spending all of this time.

And we did generate these books and things out of that time. But I also vividly remember kind of sitting down with the Afghan friends. with which we are living, perhaps at the end of the day or at the end of a particular week, and they would have a kind of a quizzical look on their faces, and there would be this kind of misunderstanding as to exactly what it was we were doing all day up in this room, and, you know, they would say, you know, why don't you just come down and just enjoy your day and just, like, have a conversation with us. There's this word in Pashtu, it's Bandar, which is kind of a, almost a kind of an institution or a social custom or something, which is just, I guess the closest would be in American English like shooting the breeze or something.

It's just sitting down. Chit chat. Yeah, chit chat, doing nothing. But it's a thing. It's not just something you do while you're waiting for something else. You go to the river to do Bandar with your friends. And this was kind of peak existence for a Kandahari, if you had everything sorted such that you could just spend all of your day doing Bandar with other people. And suddenly, yeah, that was a kind of a parallel experience which was going on alongside this productive life, in quotes.

You know, there's studies that show this when you're kind of like an outlier. You actually, you know, instead of the group ostracizing you, you are often seen as somebody with power. it's like oh wow they did that well maybe i can do that you know and it can be something as like some of the studies are like somebody who puts their feet up on the table and you know in a situation where that's not necessarily called for that that's actually seen as a power move so if we can kind of think about what what do we really value how do we give ourselves permission for it and then see doing that recognize that that's going to be a lot of pushing against the status quo but then realizing maybe that's a power move and then that's the beginning of ripples that other people

are going to be able to give themselves permission to do something similar. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Death of Leisure. Thanks to writer and researcher Alex Strick von Linskotten, Anne Helen Peterson, senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News, Bridget Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America, and Alex Sager, Associate Professioner, Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. For more about our guests and their work,

please visit our website at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli. Nikola Lukshic is the senior producer, executive producer Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyid. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.