Why Your Leisure Time Is in Danger
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Highlights
- Iceland recently concluded a much-publicized five-year experiment in which 2,500 workers from more than 100 different firms reduced their working hours from 40 to 35 or 36 a week. Earlier this year, the Spanish government embarked on a similar experiment, cutting work to 32 hours a week. In 2019, Microsoft Japan also tried out a shorter workweek. Companies reported improvements in efficiency and overall productivity; in Microsoftâs case, productivity rose by 40 percent.
- Leisure is usefulâbut only insofar as it remains leisure. Once that time is viewed as a means to improve employee morale and higher growth, then leisure loses the very quality that makes it so potent.
- Bertrand Russell, who wrote the essay âIn Praise of Idlenessâ
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Neuroscientists speak of the âincubation periodâ that often precedes illumination as an absence of task-related thought. Cognitive psychologists have shown that leisure lends itself to the type of âintrinsic motivationâ that is uniquely effective for learning.
- We yearn to âmake the most ofâ our free time, so we are constantly giving our evenings, weekends, and vacations over to our self-advancement. Labor-market precarity and the growth of the gig economy have sharpened these incentives. Pure leisure now feels like pure indulgence.
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But as individuals, we gain from preserving a space for the doing of things for their own sake, a zone free of optimization. As Pieper wrote, âWork is the means of life; leisure the end.â