Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243) Page 12
We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else. The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling. In this understanding of the situation, work might be an unavoidable necessity for certain people—above all, for the slaves whose toil made possible the leisure of the citizens of Athens and Rome—but it was fundamentally undignified, and certainly not the main point of being alive.
This same essential idea remained intact across centuries of subsequent historical upheaval: that leisure was life’s center of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption. Even the onerous lives of medieval English peasants were suffused with leisure: they unfolded according to a calendar that was dominated by religious holidays and saints’ days, along with multiday village festivals, known as “ales,” to mark momentous occasions such as marriages and deaths. (Or less momentous ones, like the annual lambing, the season when ewes give birth—any excuse to get drunk.) Some historians claim that the average country-dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days each year, and while those figures are disputed, nobody doubts that leisure lay near the heart of almost every life. Apart from anything else, while all that recreation might have been fun, it wasn’t exactly optional. People faced strong social pressure not to work all the time: you observed religious holidays because the church required it; and in a close-knit village, it wouldn’t have been easy to shirk the other festivities, either. Another result was that a sense of leisureliness seeped into the crevices of the days people did spend at work. “The laboring man,” complained the bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, sometime around 1570, “will take his rest long in the morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he comes at his work. Then he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it, at his accustomed hour, else there is grudging and murmuring … At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day.”
But industrialization, catalyzed by the spread of the clock-time mentality, swept all that away. Factories and mills required the coordinated labor of hundreds of people, paid by the hour, and the result was that leisure became sharply delineated from work. Implicitly, workers were offered a deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it didn’t damage—and preferably enhanced—your usefulness on the job. (So there was a profit motive at play when the upper classes expressed horror at the lower classes’ enthusiasm for drinking gin: coming to work with a hangover, because you’d spent your leisure time getting wasted, was a violation of the deal.) In one narrow sense, this new situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work. The problem was that for the average mill or factory worker, industrial work wasn’t sufficiently meaningful to be the point of existence: you did it for the money, not for its intrinsic satisfactions. So now the whole of life—work and leisure time alike—was to be valued for the sake of something else, in the future, rather than for itself.
Ironically, the union leaders and labor reformers who campaigned for more time off, eventually securing the eight-hour workday and the two-day weekend, helped entrench this instrumental attitude toward leisure, according to which it could be justified only on the grounds of something other than pure enjoyment. They argued that workers would use any additional free time they might be given to improve themselves, through education and cultural pursuits—that they’d use it, in other words, for more than just relaxing. But there is something heartbreaking about the nineteenth-century Massachusetts textile workers who told one survey researcher what they actually longed to do with more free time: To “look around to see what is going on.” They yearned for true leisure, not a different kind of productivity. They wanted what the maverick Marxist Paul Lafargue would later call, in the title of his best-known pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy.
We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”
Pathological Productivity
And yet here we’ll need to confront a rarely acknowledged truth about rest, which is that we’re not merely the victims of an economic system that denies us any opportunity for it. Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people who don’t actually want to rest—who find it seriously unpleasant to pause in our efforts to get things done, and who get antsy when we feel as though we’re not being sufficiently productive. An extreme example is the case of the novelist Danielle Steel, who in a 2019 interview with Glamour magazine revealed the secret of how she’d managed to write 179 books by the time she turned seventy-two, releasing them at the rate of almost seven per year: by working almost literally all the time, in twenty-hour days, with a handful of twenty-four-hour writing periods per month, a single week’s holiday each year, and practically no sleep. (“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor,” she was quoted as saying. “If I have four hours, it’s a really good night for me.”) Steel drew widespread praise for her “badass” work habits. But it’s surely not unreasonable to perceive, in this sort of daily routine, the evidence of a serious problem—of a deep-rooted inability to refrain from using time productively. In fact, Steel herself seems to concede that she uses productivity as a way to avoid confronting difficult emotions. Her personal ordeals have included the loss of an adult son to a drug overdose and no fewer than five divorces—and work, she told the magazine, is “where I take refuge. Even when bad things have happened in my personal life, it’s a constant. It’s something solid I can escape into.”
If it seems uncharitable to accuse Steel of being pathologically unable to relax, I ought to clarify that the malady is widespread. I’ve suffered from it as acutely as anyone; and unlike Steel, I can’t claim to have brought joy to millions of readers of romantic fiction as a happy side effect. Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argu
ed that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell. Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter. Their commitment to frugal living supplied the other half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.
It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live. There was no chance that all that hard work could improve the probability that one would be saved: after all, the whole point of the doctrine of predestination was that nothing could influence one’s fate. On the other hand, wouldn’t someone who already was saved naturally demonstrate a tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness? On this fraught understanding, idleness became an especially anxiety-inducing experience, to be avoided at all costs—not merely a vice that might lead to damnation if you overindulged in it, as many Christians had long maintained, but one that might be evidence of the horrifying truth that you already were damned.
We flatter ourselves that we’ve outgrown such superstitions today. And yet there remains, in our discomfort with anything that feels too much like wasting time, a yearning for something not all that dissimilar from eternal salvation. As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when the activities with which we fill our leisure hours increasingly come to resemble not merely work but sometimes, as in the case of a SoulCycle class or a CrossFit workout, actual physical punishment—the self-flagellation of guilty sinners anxious to expunge the stain of laziness before it’s too late.
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now.
Rules for Rest
Given all the blame I’ve been heaping on religion here for the modern westerner’s inability to relax, it might seem perverse to suggest that we should look to religion for the antidote as well. But it was members of religious communities who first understood a crucial fact about rest, which is that it isn’t simply what occurs by default whenever you take a break from work. You need ways to make it likely that rest will actually happen.
Friends of mine live in an apartment building on the historically Jewish Lower East Side of New York that’s equipped with a “Shabbat elevator”: step inside it between Friday evening and Saturday night, and you’ll find yourself stopping at every floor, even if nobody wants to get on or off there, because it’s been programmed to spare Jewish residents and visitors from having to violate the rule against operating electrical switches on the sabbath. (In fact, the actual prohibition, laid down in ancient Jewish law, is against lighting fires, but modern authorities interpret that to include completing electrical circuits. The other thirty-eight categories of banned activities have been interpreted as outlawing everything from inflating water wings at the swimming pool to tearing sheets of toilet paper from a roll.) Such rules strike many of the rest of us as absurd. But if they are, it’s an absurdity well tailored to an equally absurd reality about humans, which is that we need this sort of pressure in order to get ourselves to rest. As the writer Judith Shulevitz explains:
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.” This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation—at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.
The idea of a communal weekly day off seems thoroughly old-fashioned today, persisting mainly in the memories of those older than about forty—who can still remember when most stores were open only six days per week—and in certain strange, vestigial laws, like the one in my city prohibiting the purchase of liquor before noon on Sundays. As a result, we’re in danger of forgetting what a radical notion the sabbath always was—radical not least because, as the former slaves who inaugurated it were at pains to point out, it applied to everyone without exception. (Shulevitz notes that in the Torah verses setting out the rules for the Jewish sabbath, the fact that even slaves must be allowed to rest gets mentioned twice, as if it were an alien idea, which the text’s author knew would need to be forcefully driven home.) And since the dawn of capitalism, it’s been radical in a second way: while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough—that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done. In his book Sabbath as Resistance, the Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.” One need not be a religious believer to feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being “on the receiving end”—in the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.
All the same, it’s surely never been harder to make the requisite psychological shift than it is today—to pause in your work for long enough to enter the coherent, harmonious, somehow thicker experience of time that comes with being “on the receiving end” of life, the feeling of stepping off the clock into “deep time,” rather than ceaselessly struggling to master it. Societal pressures used to make it relatively easy to take time off: you couldn’t go shopping when the shops weren’t open, even if you wanted to, or work when the office was locked. Besides, you’d be much less likely to skip church, or Sunday lunch with the extended family, if you knew your absence would raise eyebrows. Now, though, the pressures all push us in the other direction: the shops are open all day, every day (and all night, online). And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at home.
Personal or household rules, such as the increasingly popular idea of a self-imposed “digital sabbath,” can fill the vacuum to some extent. But they lack the social reinforcement that comes when everyone else is following the rule too, so they’re inevitably harder to abide by—and because they’re reliant on willpower, they’re prone to all the hazards involved in trying to force yourself to be more “present in the moment,” as explored in the previous chapter. The other important thing we can do as individ
uals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance. “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?” In such an era, it’s virtually guaranteed that truly stopping to rest—as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment—is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than of delight. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.