Rethinking Leisure
“There are two blessings that many Muslims took for granted — health and spare time.” Hadith Shahih Al-Bukhari
I see people my age busting their asses off at work. I understand the motivation behind it. It is still early in our career, and we want to secure a promising job that ensures our livelihood. That while earning as much income as we possibly can.
The third decade (21–30 years old) is perhaps the period of peak physical fitness in all human lifespan. We are already mature, both physically and emotionally. That is perhaps the reason it is the period when people work really hard, sometimes beyond the edge of their physical capabilities.
It is noble to be industrious. We ought to contribute to society in any meaningful way we can. And we hope our work can become of good use to civilization. Moreover, to work hard according to our abilities is to self-actualize. We need to work hard (just to make it clear for the rest of this article).
For me, spending time wisely has been the hallmark of productivity. Time is a finite resource, used continually at a consistent pace, like water dripping down from an improperly-closed faucet. Making the best use of my time has been my priority.
I wanted to be productive for the majority of my time. When I am old, I don’t want to regret my youth by spending my precious, unrewindable time doing things that did not increase my value as a person. There will be a time when I can finally be able to sit down and relax. Now is not the time.
So I read those productivity books, like Eat That Frog, The Productivity Project, Deep Work, et cetera. I want to unearth the wisdom of time management from these productivity gurus. And to be honest, they delivered. At least in making the best use of time.
But years later after I applied their ways in my life, one thing I realize. That after getting more things done in a shorter time, more tasks were coming. Instead of free time, what I get is more things to do to fill those free time.
Honestly, I didn’t stop until I became so burnt out. You know that feeling where the things you do just do not matter, and the energy that kept you working starts to dissipate away? That is most likely burnout you (and I) are experiencing.
I know burnout is a consequence of an unhealthy excessive work ethic. So I tried to cut down my work. But somehow my mind still is guilt-tripping me for it. I thought to myself that I was not resilient enough to crack under these stressful conditions. Burnout episodes and severe mental and physical exhaustion are just the prices we gotta pay if we want to achieve our dreams. Leisure at my age feels like a sin.
And these conditions worsen with the work-from-home scheme. WFH is supposed to free up a good portion of time spent commuting to the workplace. The spare time can be used for more rest and leisure. Instead, what we get is…yes, more work! Work is becoming borderless, timeless. 24/7 we are shuffled between work and personal lives. Shuffling from Instagram to Email feels like a virtual commute from life to work.
As in work is separate from life. It is not.
Leisure is the bastard of capitalism. Where time is money, time spent on doing things that has no monetary value, in a practical sense, is useless. “Oh, so you are good at playing guitar? Why don’t you make a Patreon account and create content so people can pay for your work?” “Do you like writing blogs, why don’t you join the Medium Partner’s Program so you can get paid for your stories?”. Even things that we love doing for their own sake are becoming a means for another thing — money.
That is when I realize that it is not that I am not productive enough. It is when I thought that I do not need to be productive all the time.
An appeal for leisure
Philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell once wrote a famous essay titled “In Praise of Idleness”. In this relatively short essay, he pointed out the fallacy of the working class sanctifying duty and work ethic. He thought it is just a scheme made by the leisure class (the aristocrats, business owners) to make the working class work harder so the upper echelon of society can profit off their work. The tone and the arguments, I realized, are quite…Marxist (he even mentioned dialectical materialism). But I am not going to argue about that.
Instead, he pointed out a very interesting point unrelated to the things above. Directly quoting from his essay:
“The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.” Russell B, In praise of idleness: and other essays. Routledge. 1935.
We must have experienced being so worn out by work but bored at the same time. The results? We lie in our bed, scrolling our Instagram feeds or Twitter timeline, or watching random videos on Youtube. I even assume that Tiktok developers saw how exhausted average people are in their work so they see a business opportunity to fill the niche of a ready-to-view, short, intensely gratifying video platform for these hapless bunch.
It is crazy that Russell predict this in 1935. Nineteen thirty-five. Hitler had not invaded Poland yet!
What a shame that we came into this age, where we are so preoccupied with work but cannot enjoy leisures that are inherently active. I wrote this as I look at my guitar across the room. I haven’t played my guitar again since weeks ago. Every time want to play it, I just felt so tired and prefer to do things that need less energy. Even the simple act of reading books can become so tiresome when your mind is so, so drained.
Just because an activity is not profitable, doesn’t mean it is worthless. Leisure should not be profitable. It is the antithesis of work. But it is what makes us human. It is what makes the weekly grind enjoyable. It is what makes life meaningful.
Spare time at work
Not only leisure time, the spare time we have at work is also important. It ought not to be filled with other ‘productive’ activities as productivity gurus might suggest.
This appeal was brought by American software engineer consultant and author Tom DeMarco in his book Slack. Slack, which means the spare time between work when we are not doing anything, is an important buffer for productivity. He argues that busy employees cannot be effective in handling various directions by their boss because their time is so preoccupied doing work.
He encourages CEOs and HR managers not to be obsessed with making their organization efficient and optimizing every employee’s time for productive work. Instead, they must aim to be effective and precise in achieving the company goals — and that can only be achieved by employees being given slack.
I wholly agree with Tom and Russell. Nowadays, the majority of us are knowledge workers. We use our brains to produce creative work and complete complex assignments. And cramming the majority of our time to overwork our brain and deprive it of its deserved relaxation time (leisure) is not a way to go. It only leads to burnout and reduced overall productivity.
Relax
I hope I do not sound too patronizing. I wrote this also to remind myself to relax more. Everything will fall into place, eventually. Yes, time is finite, and the youth won’t last forever. But for the same reason, we should spend a portion of our precious time living life. Not to achieve work-life balance. But to achieve Work+Leisure=Life balance.
Not only leisure we must aim for but also leisure of quality. We must avoid succumbing to the passive and unfulfilling entertainment that I mentioned above. We can spend time with our loved ones or cultivate our hobbies. Or we can exercise, jog in the local park, or join a reading club. Anything that can recharge our emotions and completes us.
All in all, I think it is nice to have enough spare time — not too much nor too little. It is tempting for people my age to look at leisure time as wasted time and try to cram all the work into our timeframe. But I don’t recommend it. Leisure is part of our lives that make our lives complete. Without leisure, we are not truly living.
