Barry's Blog

Few people can fathom how technology consultant Dale Johnson chooses to unwind from work. While his family went camping recently, Johnson conducted his quarterly foray into being a couch-potato, including  an abundance of  delivery foods, video games, and watching an auto racing event, with cars "going round and round and round all day."  In Johnson's opinion, "it's the only way to live," he says. "You've got to turn off. I'd be dead by now if I didn't." Johnson's story was recently recounted in The Wall Street Journal by CareerJournal writer Jared Sandberg.

So what do you look for in your leisure time? Doing nothing? Reading? Wall-to-wall activities? As the demands on our time continue to increase, the question isn't just about whether we can put work behind us, but as Sandberg suggests, "whether one has succeeded in finding work's 'anti-venom.'" A good many of us may return from time away at this time of the year, thoroughly frazzled.  What we thought we needed as a break from the tedium didn't really deliver as expected. Geoff Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Penn State University, observes that  "Lying around a pool is death for most people with half a brain."

Godbey explains that for our leisure time to be satisfying, it needs to resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills, and important relationships. And leisure has a hierarchy. At the lowest level, it's a search for diversion, higher up it's a search for pleasure and, at the top, it's a search for meaning. Godbey observes that "It's not that diversion is bad, but in terms of human growth, it's inferior to activities that are more pleasurable - and they're inferior to activities that are more meaningful."

Studies suggest that those people who engage in skill-oriented leisure, such as crossword puzzles, chess, bridge, etc., score higher on practical intelligence tests. "Leisure is a very important medium for making us more stupid or more intelligent," Godbey says. "At the end of your life what you've done with your leisure may be more important than what you've done at work."  

Arlie Hochschild, author of The Time Bind, suggests that in recent years, play has become increasingly more like work. While in the19th century, leisure involved more "loafing and unexpected events," she says, these days, "it's more project - oriented," she adds. "You kind of work at play."

I'm reminded that while our modern understanding tends to define leisure as "free time," the older, classical understanding conceived of leisure as the cultivation of the self, and a concern for the higher virtues of life. Even our English word, "leisure," comes from the Latin licere, meaning, "to be permitted," while the Latin word for work was negotium, meaning "non-leisure." Work was thus perceived to be secondary to leisure.

Could it really be true that work is not the summum bonum, the "primary purpose" of my existence? How would my life look different if I really valued the importance of leisure? Is it actually possible to value leisure and worship in out utilitarian, work-oriented culture?

 
"Most Americans tend to worship their work, to work at their play, and to play at their worship. As a result, their meanings and values are distorted. Their relationships disintegrate faster than they can keep them in repair, and their lifestyles resemble a cast of characters in search of a plot."     -Gordon Dahl 

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow