Oliver Burkeman’s timely book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals puts productivity in perspective. For this post and the next, I’ll be considering two points Burkeman makes about how to think about free time, and what makes life meaningful.

In this post, we’re thinking about free time; what it means to have actual leisure. If you enjoy spending your leisure burrowing down internet rabbit holes, look up what “leisure” means. (Economists, psychologists, and cruise ship companies all differ.)

Here, we’ll go with the definition of leisure as free time, meaning time off from paid work and time distinct from the unpaid labor of life maintenance and domestic chores.

Your leisure, your free time, is also a contested and controversial commodity. Almost no one will encourage you to rest, unless you are in a crisis; too many of which come about because we don’t permit ourselves to rest without one.

You have to claim and protect your free time. Many forces agitate against that.

The attention economy wants your leisure time. The workplace and the gig economy, and the creator economy want your leisure time. Non-profit organizations want your leisure time. Friends and family want your leisure time. Self-development coaches want your leisure time.

Burkeman argues that contemporary culture pushes us to make our free time useful. But what if an integral part of leisure means taking time to be utterly non-productive? To improve nothing, not even ourselves?

Putting Leisure to Work: The Church, the Village, the Factory, the Home, the Internet

Burkeman writes about how industrialization detached workers from ancient communal demands on leisure time: the socially enforced holidays and festivals of church and village. Although these holidays were time off from routine work, they were not free time to do whatever you wanted (Burkeman 2021, p 146).

Burkeman says little about gender and leisure, but we don’t even have to go back to medieval times to see how communal celebrations traditionally relied on the work of women. Sending invitations, greeting cards, notes. Budgeting. Coordinating travel plans. Cleaning and decorating the house. Shopping, or making gifts (or both). Wrapping gifts. Figuring out seating arrangements. Cleaning and ironing table linens. Planning the menu, shopping, cooking. Setting out the serving dishes, dusting off the china, setting and decorating the table. Cooking, baking, and more cooking. Making sure the children are nicely dressed. (Making sure you are, too.) Cleaning up afterward; plus the emotional labor of doing it with a smile.

I wisely married a man who loves to cook, and my husband and I negotiated holiday tasks, so we have gender diversity with orchestrating holidays in our home. (We also lowered our standards. No regrets.) I remember past holiday gatherings fondly, but I don’t think of communal celebrations as leisure. They are meaningful but also a lot of work.

Burkeman focuses on how the industrial age changed ideas about leisure. As church and village influence waned, workplace influence increased. We come to the hard-won eight-hour workday and five-day workweek. Burkeman recounts how labor reformers and unions argued that if workers had more time off, they would spend that time on self-improvement projects, making them more valuable for employers.

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.) (Burkeman 2021, p 146)

Perhaps in our current era, screens are our gin. At the same time, many of us work as unpaid distillers for large social media companies, spending our free time creating and posting the content they need. (I wrote thousands of words for Reddit before I started this blog. )

Just Looking Around: Freeing Some Time from Improving Anything

Burkeman writes:

…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. (Burkeman 2021, p 147)

To see what is going on—enjoying what is around us and thinking our own thoughts—or not thinking about much at all, is what I call living at a savoring pace.

Burkeman asks us to consider the great value of leisure time when we don’t do anything to improve ourselves, or anything else — having actual, free, time:

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well” […] 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.” (Burkeman 2021, pp 147-148)

Just looking around is vital to the human spirit.

And yet in our culture’s mania for self-improvement, even just looking around often gets turned into more inner work, harnessed to “practicing mindfulness.”*

One of my seminary professors pointed out that we need to permit ourselves to wonder, especially as adults. We need to re-learn how to wonder. Not to have all the answers or even be trying to get them. To wonder.

I believe we also need to permit ourselves just to look around, to let our minds wander.

Or not.

References

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals. First. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle edition.

Notes

*A warning: just looking around, without practicing mindfulness at all, might still lead you inadvertently to improve yourself by learning something anyway. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

And other times, you see things that help you wonder. Here are some things I have seen over the last few weeks, just looking around:

- a hot air balloon floating low over my next-door neighbor’s house — I saw the balloonist fire up the gas to get it higher

- migrating monarch butterflies — one at a time, a few every day, heading west toward the Appalachian mountain chain

- migrating blue jays, in flocks of about a dozen (Did you know some blue jays migrate? I didn’t. I unintentionally learned something that day.)

- a day hiker equipped with a costume scimitar rather than a trekking pole

- a squirrel sitting on the perching rock in our birdbath… just looking around