We’ve Already Stopped Baking Bread
For the last five months many Americans have found themselves with a wealth of unstructured time, something pined for in harried, pursuit-driven working hours but in practice is pawned off for a recycled streaming show and hapless Twitter debates. We don’t know how to face leisure. This historically formative time once revered as “sacred idleness” or “uncut diamonds” is treated more like triage for our day of work with the basest of recuperative measures. The morning’s ambitions of breaking open that novel, picking up the guitar or cracking the code of the sourdough starter becomes daunting in the evening hour burn-out, so when Netflix asks: “do you want to keep watching?” we answer with a resounding, anxiety-deafening “hell yeah.”
Today’s notion of leisure as “time free from work,” is a far cry from what it once was. Until the last 50–100 years, it was a spiritually fundamental aspect of human life. In Politics Aristotle wrote: “This is the main question: with what one’s leisure is filled.” He and other ancients understood leisure as the time to contribute to the highest pursuits: reading, writing, and philosophy. In medieval times it was seen, as one historian describes, as a “receptive attitude of mind that contemplates reality.” In the early 1800s, the evening leisure hours for most were a precious reprieve from the backbreaking work of farming and were spent reading, singing and…
