Leisure
Last Updated: Feb 15, 2024
Thesis: The way an elite class pursues and practices leisure both reflects and forms the highest spiritual good of a civilization.
An unscholarly approach.
Ancient concept of otium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otium
The role of leisure in the life of ancient elites
- Martial leisure, preparing for war, the hunt, cultivation of the body. Sparta, the Mongols, the Rus, nobility.
- Greco-Roman philosophical / contemplative leisure
- Christian leisure: Augustine and monasticism
Otium in the Renaissance
Petrarch
Productivity as a modern spiritual discipline
Self-help, productivity porn, Cal Newport, immaterial productivity (most people are alienated from their labor in a physical sense.
In the world of busyness, leisure is subversive and approaches the heretical.
The disappearence of contemplative leisure among the modern elite
Alternatives to productivity: food, travel, philanthropy, status display
Employment and enslavement
- Selling one’s time, being on the clock, Graeber and BS jobs
- Taleb
- Keynes’ failed predictions about leisure
Leisure as alternative to employment
- Ancient understanding of this
- Illich, the right to useful unemployment