The Decline of Modern Leisure

Leisure has become suspicious.

At least, it certainly feels that way. An unstructured Saturday morning makes us feel a strange guilt, as if we had forgotten an appointment with seriousness itself. We stare at our phones, invent small errands, or promise that we will rest once we finish one more task. Our discomfort suggests that leisure is no longer a natural condition of life, but some sort of fragile permission we struggle to grant ourselves.

Modern leisure, if it can still be called that, has been corrupted. It expects us to be productive. But even when we break that barrier and finally convince ourselves to spend some leisurely time, it comes so freighted with pressure and anticipation that the act of resting itself becomes impossible, and we simply can’t do it.

This isn’t quite leisure.

Leisure requires no systems, no structures, no strict planning. Those belong to work, which demands speed, precision, and timing, and should ideally be kept to a civilized minimum, as we all know. Leisure, on the other hand, is expansive. It is allergic to any sort of hurry, and poorly fills any spreadsheets.

The ancient Greeks, who knew something about reclining, called it scholē, from which we derive the word school, which is deliciously ironic, since school is now where the joy of independent thought is murdered. But back then, scholē meant the time for contemplation, beauty, truth and idle thought. Of course, the ancients could only indulge in this for slaves did the labor for them. But one of the very few victories of progress is that now we have science and technology, which makes leisure available to almost all of us.

A luxury we seem determined not to enjoy.

In the Mediterranean, though, they still maintain a ceremonial respect for leisure. There are pockets where it lives; terraces where old men nurse a single glass of wine for hours, piazzas where time dissolves into laugh and backgammon, afternoons that never to resolve into productivity. The waiter does not hurry. Shops close arbitrarily. Life is still being lived at its own pace, which is to say, delightfully inconvenient to modernity.

This infuriates the modern soul, trained as it is to convert every moment into value. And herein lies the tragedy, that leisure, real leisure, demands a small death of ambition. It requires that one puts their problems gently aside for just a few hours. Of course, everyone has their problems, their duties, their responsibilities, their desires and hopes. It is not that these problems do not matter, but rather that unless one can solve them right now, they will still be there later, untouched by one’s anxiety.

One’s ability to temporarily abstain from one’s own worries and miseries is a prerequisite for leisure. To sit in peace, without urgency or anxiety, despite the certainty of future problems, requires courage, trust, and the slightly delusional belief that, for a few moments, nothing else matters.

This is why leisure is an art, and it must be mastered, lest the heavy weight of existence, freedom and responsibility, all at once, descend upon us. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we ignore them for a while, and enjoy ourselves a little, perhaps with friends, perhaps with a book, perhaps with our own thoughts, without a doubt, with a glass of wine.

Do not fool yourself, leisure might have a little to do with distraction, but it has nothing to do with numbness, addiction, or denial; the kind one finds in alcoholism or scrolling on your phones. It is not denial, nor decadence, nor a refusal to participate in the world. It is a conscious pause in which one chooses to enjoy its small beauties, hidden under our noses. And it requires the understanding that some hours, after all, are valuable precisely because they leave no trace, produce nothing, and solve no problems whatsoever .

All of this may sound like philosophy, but it is mostly an excuse. An excuse to sit longer than necessary. To order another drink I don’t need. To postpone, deliberately, the moment when I must once again become useful.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is absolutely nothing I should be doing in the next few hours

And I intend to do it well.

Until next time,