We Make Life Short by Dissipating It

Seneca observed that “we do not receive a life that is short, but rather we make it so,” by dissipating it in “extravagance and carelessness.” How better to describe the contemporary leisure experience? Americans spend, on average, more than three hours per day—more than 60 percent of their “leisure” time—watching TV and scrolling through social media (often at the same time). “All boats are rising here,” boasts entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. “More people are watching more content today than ever before.” According to industry analysts, we are in a “digital renaissance,” a “new entertainment Golden Age” that has been ushered in by a “tsunami of content.”

In bingeing on every passing wave of “content”—most of which is just as soon forgotten—we ourselves have become flotsam. Every fleeting moment of our spare time is surrendered to the superficial offerings of the attention economy, all of it designed for addiction, the goal being to monetize people’s experiences rather than create meaningful ones. If pressed, most participants themselves admit that these activities are ultimately unsatisfying

Yet in the context of today’s work-life structure—with leisure fully subordinated to a fetishistic ideal of labor—such activities make a kind of sense. How one fills one’s discretionary time is heavily determined by the mentally and physically depleting effects of work, and by the imminent return to work after some invariably short period of respite. Leisure today exists for work, which means that it is not actually leisure at all. The more appropriate term is recreation, a mere means of recovery—re-creating the body—for the sake of doing more work. It is a window for “pastimes” and unwinding (the implication being that you will soon be wound back up).

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...regardless of whether you dedicate yourself to contemplation or to some other project performed for its own sake, what matters is that you choose it yourself as an active participant in the world. To be passive is to be transformed from a subject into a mere object of other forces. Just as there can be alienated labor, so can there be alienated leisure, in which your free time is not your own because it has been commoditized or unwittingly surrendered. Just as no one ever looks back and wishes she had spent more time at the office, nor will anyone today later wish she had spent more time streaming videos and “twitching puppetwise” to the tugs of algorithms.