Why Don't We Have More Leisure?

Aristotle thought that only those with leisure could philosophize, and so he claimed that slaves were dispositionally and circumstantially incapable of philosophizing.

But in our times, many more people have free time, and yet don't use it to philosophize or contemplate the meaning of life. They—we—prefer to watch TV, go to parties, pursue adventures, attend concerts, scroll through social media, do any number of things other than think.

Hannah Arendt noticed this in the late 1950s. Democracy and egalitarian sensibilities should have seen greater distribution of aristocratic ideals; instead, what it brought was “mass culture” or what we today call “pop culture.” Arendt, because she was a high-minded intellectual, believed that moderns had squandered the gift of their freedom, preferring to indulge their lower appetites, as if they were still slaves preparing for another arduous day of labor. The Enlightenment had delivered formal freedom, but mass culture had ensured it would remain only a formality.

Arendt joins the company of many 20th century thinkers who sought to solve a puzzle—if modernity was supposed to be an improvement over previous ages, how come it produced totalitarianism?

From Arendt’s point of view, we have more time off, which we fill with entertainment (or goal-setting or social and familial duties) but not more leisure, because we are still incapable of enjoying leisure. Even when we read great books, Arendt thought, we’re too often doing it in pursuit of status—to say we’ve read them—rather than to engage deeply in the thought they provoke.

Assuming that leisure is a non-goal oriented, open posture of contemplation, why don’t we do more of it as a society? And is it such a bad thing if we decide that leisure isn’t for us? Endowed with a Protestant work ethic, we’d rather better ourselves so as to best our opponents the next day at work. Tech companies typically get high valuations not when they produce more leisure, but when they get us to be more attached to our screens. Greater productivity and efficiency in work life have not yielded commensurate gains in reflective life.

No time just to think, to just to be—even as we’re supposed to have gotten better at saving time. But the time we save is so we can build more products more quickly that save us more time. Leisure is for losers. This (American?) sentiment is ironic, as we will have taken an aristocratic ideal and demoted it the bottom of our value system, while taking the ideal of gladiator-servant and turned him into our aspirational model.

Is it any wonder that today’s celebrities are often entertainers?