True Leisure and the Tyranny of Total Work - Michael Ashcroft

tags:: #source/article Productivity on/working
author:: Michael Ashcroft
Source

Although it’s one of the most fundamental problems of human existence, it’s natural to fear death and try to distract ourselves from thinking about it.

I’ve found that one of the most insidious drugs of choice is also one of the more socially acceptable ones: work

Work is productive. Work puts food on the table. Work is virtuous. While societal narratives recognize that compulsive working is unhealthy—hence the term “workaholism”—your relationship to work has to deteriorate to quite an extent before such protective mechanisms kick in. The culture encourages and rewards unhealthy attitudes towards work.

The combination of the fear of finitude and perception of work as virtuous gives rise to a phenomenon called total work, which was coined by German philosopher Josef Pieper. Total work is a state of being where work is the central and defining focus of life. Put another way, total work is what happens when leisure ceases to exist.

According to Pieper, leisure is the capacity to “just be” without the need for distraction.

Consider what happens when you have nothing in particular to occupy your attention. Often, it’s in these moments that you find challenging feelings becoming more salient in your awareness. This is the loop that keeps driving so many of us back to distraction.

leisure is not a break from work, because to decide to take time off from work is to assert that life is defined by work

Leisure is not studying in order to be better at work. Leisure is not meditation performed in order to be more relaxed and effective at work. Leisure is not exercising in order to be more energized for work. And leisure certainly isn’t a “power nap” between meetings.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And when unable to sit quietly in a room alone, many of us choose to work instead, and then we tell each other that this is just fine, actually.

this task seems Sisyphean: there is always more work to do than your capacity to do it

Induced demand also applies to work. You implement a new system to get through your emails more quickly and, strangely enough, you start to receive a lot more email.

the adage “if you want something done, ask a busy person” seems to hold true

You can’t do everything—and that’s good

before the age of modernity, people’s capacity for work was constrained by clear limits

He’d never conceive of doing a month’s worth of cow milking to get ahead on the task and free up his future.

By welcoming the constraints of our own finitude, the choices we make become imbued with meaning.

It’s precisely because we can’t do everything that what we choose to do is important. And the moment you accept that you can’t do everything, you resolve work’s problem of induced demand.

First, have a system that constrains the amount of work you commit to doing at any moment. In particular, have a clear limit on projects that you are currently working on.

take time to grieve the loss of the roads not taken

if these are dreams that parts of you once held in earnest, even naively, then there are parts of you that may be sad with your life as it is