The Culture that Create Abundance has Difficulty Enjoying It

All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent. To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedom over more of their time. Yet because we lack a shared leisure ethic, we have not availed ourselves of that option. Nor does it occur to us even to demand or strive for such a dispensation.

One reason for this is that the values and culture that created our current abundance may be incompatible with actually enjoying it. Sparta had the same problem. After mastering the art of war and achieving supreme domination, it could no longer preserve itself, because its citizens didn’t know what to do with the leisure they had won. In today’s economic parlance, they had been deskilled in the area that ultimately mattered most.

Moreover, free time, like money, is not equally distributed. Only the very rich can fully orient their lives toward leisure. The rest of us are left with only scraps of time (“weekends”) to devote to the efforts that real leisure—as opposed to idle entertainment—requires. Cultivating a rich appreciation of the art of filmmaking yields satisfactions that simply watching movies does not, but who has time for the former?

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Most of us are also risk averse, and so will seek meaning from culturally established, socially accepted, reliable sources. “Bringing home a paycheck” ticks all those boxes. It may not be ideal, but at least it is something. To find meaning without such structure requires more of what the philosopher Martin Hägglund calls “secular faith”: the belief that what you yourself have chosen to do with your limited lifespan matters. Thinking through this process can be unnerving. We are skeptical, or perhaps even frightened, of what we will find once we have stopped going through the motions of everyday life and begun to imagine a realm of freedom that is less circumscribed than that which we have always known. While technology eventually could liberate us in such a fashion, there seems to be at least some part of us that does not want it to.