You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously
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As a professor, my primary vocation is to teach young adults skills that will prepare them to excel in their careers. The implicit assumption society makes is that professional excellence requires formal training, whereas excellence in the rest of life does not. There is no Harvard School of Leisure, after all. Work demands discipline and training; nonwork is easy and enjoyable and comes naturally.
Our higher-education system, including my university, operates on this assumption. But to me, it’s very questionable. Leisure is not at all straightforward or easy. I have no interest in frittering away a minute of my day on fruitless pursuits. I want everything I do to be generative. I want to use my nonwork activities, as much as my work ones, to become a wiser, happier, more effective, better person. Leisure is serious business.
My attitude is not, in fact, especially original: The 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper believed that when we understand and practice leisure properly, we can achieve our best selves—and even our capacity to transform society for the better. But to do leisure like this, we must treat it with every bit as much seriousness as we do our careers.
[Arthur C. Brooks: How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever]
Given their observable behavior, people evidently believe that leisure is desirable. As Aristotle reasoned in his Nicomachean Ethics, “We toil that we may rest, and war that we may be at peace.” When our work is most demanding, we typically define leisure as its opposite: complete inactivity. For example, when the burned-out 51-year-old CEO of a $68 billion investment firm abruptly quit his job in 2022, he explained to reporters what he planned to do next: “I just want to go sit at the beach and do nothing.” Even if we’re not finding our work overtaxing, we still talk about taking a break from it that will allow us to reenergize—in order to work more and better. Either way, we’re defining leisure in relation to work, as the absence of work or as an adjunct to work.
Pieper rejected this whole way of thinking. A follower of Plato and Thomas Aquinas, Pieper believed that leisure was an inherently valuable, constructive part of life, and he thought we misunderstood leisure when we defined it as work’s opposite. In his 1948 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he described it as an attitude of openness to the world through deep contemplation. In Pieper’s conception, the opposite of leisure is not work, but acedia, an ancient-Greek word that means spiritual or mental sloth.
Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such “acediac” activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships.
Pieper especially focused on faith experiences, because he believed that “culture lives on religion through divine worship.” Perhaps you have never thought of going to a house of worship as leisure, but Pieper would say that’s because you never took your leisure seriously enough.
You might be thinking that this approach to leisure doesn’t sound especially fun to you, not so chill, but social scientists’ findings suggest that Pieper knew a thing or two about well-being. We may intuitively think that the best way to get happier is, like the CEO, to “go sit at the beach and do nothing.” But researchers have found that this kind of do-nothing leisure, including vacation travel, provides only minor, temporary boosts of happiness. What gives us more sustained well-being are pursuits involving social engagement, personal reflection, and outdoor activities.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life]
The point here is that just as we should be excellent at our jobs, we should become excellent at leisure. Doing leisure well will generate the sort of growth in our well-being that work cannot provide. We need to take the time to dwell on life’s big questions without distraction, to learn to appreciate what is beautiful, to transcend our workaday lives and consider what is divine.
To achieve excellence at anything in life requires time, effort, and discipline. In this spirit, here are three ways to build your “leisure aptitude.”
1. Structure your leisure.
The Catholic bishop Fulton Sheen was famous throughout the United States as a radio and television star from the 1930s through the ’60s. His lasting legacy, however, was instructing people to undertake what he called a “Holy Hour” of prayer, scripture reading, and meditation each day. He advised everyone whose schedule permitted it to keep this practice at the same time every day and for the whole hour. Millions of priests and laity still do so to this day, and people swear by it as one of the most helpful parts of their faith.
Whether you are religious or not, consider observing your own Holy Hour. Maybe it can be a time in the morning when you read something truly meaningful, or a walk after lunch when you leave your device behind, or a period of uninterrupted conversation after dinner with the person you love best. But structure this Holy Hour into your day as you would an important work meeting.
2. Don’t fritter away your leisure.
One of the biggest killers of productive leisure is the inability to get started. If you have an hour off, you might start by reading the news, then answering email messages … and before you know it, the time has passed in merely routine and forgettable activity. To avoid this, program the time in advance and get right into it. If the leisure activity is to read a certain book from 6 to 7 a.m., have the book ready, start promptly, and do absolutely nothing else. Put your phone on silent and out of reach, and block all distractions. This is crucial time.
3. Set specific leisure goals.
Humans are inherently goal-oriented. In any area of personal improvement, whether your career or your health, goals—and making progress toward them—are central to staying motivated. For example, you probably won’t be able to keep to an exercise plan unless you have the ambition to get stronger and healthier in a measurable way, and see regular, tangible advancement toward that end.
Goal orientation should also apply to your leisure activities. Instead of randomly dipping into a holy book in your religious tradition, say, set about reading the entire volume in a year. Similarly, your goal for daily meditation might be to work toward a week-long silent retreat. Or if your leisure purpose is to listen to music, focus on a particular composer with an end in mind: Listen and learn about J. S. Bach every day, for example, with the goal of attending a summer Bach festival as an expert listener.
[Derek Thompson: The free-time paradox in America]
Pieper’s philosophy of leisure offers more than a formula for organizing your own recreational time; it also asserts that leisure is “the basis of culture.” How so? Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony.
We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways. That is a culture of joy and interest I want to be part of.