Most Americans today find work drudgery and leisure anxiously vacant. In our hours off work, we rarely achieve thrilling adventure, deliberate self-education, or engage in Whitmanian loafing. At the same time, faith is eroding in the idea that paid work can offer pleasure, self-discovery, a means for improving the world, or anything more than material subsistence. Some doubt that paid labor will continue to exist at all. Technological automation threatens to expel workers in droves and press wages downward. In the decades to come, if current trends continue, more people will be handmaidens to robots (think of the harried “pickers” in sweltering Amazon warehouses), or working at the beck and call of efficiency algorithms, than will be supervisors of these technologies. In some industries, subservience to information technology is already the status quo. Truck drivers, once a work force vaunted for its manly independence, are now subject to electronic surveillance, bound to devices that override their own judgment about whether they are too fatigued to drive.
The jobs lost to automation, however, may not be worth mourning. Work these days is not just sterile ground for self-cultivation. It is a site of coercion. Most companies, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues in her remarkable Private Government, operate like communist dictatorships. Communist, because the firm (by definition) owns all the assets and organizes production through central planning rather than internal markets. Dictatorships, because at-will employment—the contractual norm in the United States—allows employers to fire workers for any or no reason, including their speech on social media, their haircut, their choice of sexual partner, or the inconvenient fact that their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss (the last a real-life example Anderson mentions). The infringements and invasions that are daily parts of modern work would be seen as impermissible violations if demanded by a government instead of an employer. Hence some people, such as the British work-refusers recently profiled by the sociologist David Frayne, have tried to subsist outside the workplace in part or altogether.
Accompanying this crisis of work is a crisis of leisure. Americans spend their time off work in unfocused restlessness. Passive amusements dominate nonwork hours, with television consuming the lion’s share of leisure. (American adults watch, on average, 2.7 hours of TV a day, according to US Labor Department surveys; a recent study by Nielsen pegged that figure at more than five hours daily.) And distraction, especially the states of minimal absorption encouraged by browsing on the Internet, is an enemy of both work and high-quality leisure. The slothful withdrawal that characterizes our off hours, coupled with the well-documented weakening of local and community ties, has dispiriting civic implications. The number of Americans who spent 2016 reclining on their beds or sofas, laptops perched on their stomachs as they watched a vulgar demagogue seize power, almost certainly stands in the tens of millions.
Recreational pursuits more demanding than fleeting digital absorption are, increasingly, acts of consumption. Leisure is not something you “do” but something you “buy,” whether in the form of hotels and cruises or Arianna Huffington–vetted mindfulness materials. The leisure industry provides work for some while promising relaxation to others, for a fee.
The sorry state of leisure is partly a consequence of an economy in which we are never fully detached from the demands of work. The category of “free” time is not only defined by its opposite (time “free” of work); it is subordinated to it. Free time, Theodor Adorno warns, “is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor.” Free time is mere recovery time. Spells of lethargy between periods of labor do little but prepare us for the resumption of work. Workers depleted by their jobs and in need of recuperation turn to escapist entertainment and vacuous hobbies. And the problem of figuring out when work is “over,” in an economy in which knowledge workers spend their job hours tweeting and their evening hours doing unpaid housework and child care, has never seemed more perplexing.
The prospect of a “postwork” future has spurred renewed support in some quarters for a universal basic income provided by the state. Such proposals have made modest inroads in Europe: Last year, Switzerland put an unconditional monthly income plan to a national vote (finding 23 percent of the electorate in favor), and Finland is testing basic income schemes with a 2,000-person pilot study. The case for basic income has more recently been taken up in the United States, and not just by proponents on the left. Some libertarians and technology-sector leaders have come to see basic income as a way to quell the discontent that structural unemployment and growing wealth inequality might otherwise unleash.
The outcome of today’s push for basic income is far from clear. (The agenda will likely make no strides during the Trump administration.) And blithe predictions about the “end of work” and the consequent need to rethink leisure are often misleadingly simplistic: Analysts such as James Livingston and Yuval Noah Harari routinely understate the obstacles standing in the way of schemes like basic income in large, ethnically diverse countries, and ignore the likelihood that widespread automation will make people feel more precarious and harried (because of the need to cobble together an income from whatever short-term freelance work they can get) rather than less.
The truth is that we need to rethink leisure (however little of it we may possess) regardless of whether paid labor remains the center of our economic structure. (...)
The Idle Future
“The idea that the poor should have leisure,” wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” “has always been shocking to the rich.” Along with John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published two years earlier, Russell’s essay, in which he argues for a four-hour workday, represents a serious attempt to understand what the future could hold for work. If the Victorians’ fanatical devotion to work was passing away, what would replace it?
Russell suspected that for British society in the 1930s, a radically diminished workday was already within reach. That the British populace did not already enjoy a deliciously idle society struck the philosopher as the result of deliberate political choices that overworked half the population and left the rest “to starve as unemployed.” He points to the apparent flexibility of the British labor market during World War I. All the men and women connected with the war effort—serving in the armed forces, working in weapons production, engaging in spying and propaganda—were for the war’s duration withdrawn from productive work. Yet general living standards were higher than ever.
The Therapeutic Three-Hour Workday
Keynes, for his part, saw the leisurely future of England and the United States as an inevitable byproduct of already-visible economic trends. “Mankind is solving its economic problem,” he declares; “the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years” (emphasis in the original). Where Russell predicted a four-hour weekday, Keynes suspected that just three hours would suffice. The “age of leisure and of abundance”—an age, he implies, that all of humankind will enter together—is on the cusp of emergence. Meeting material needs was a collective problem shared by the human race. That the economic gains brought about by technology might accrue more to the capital holdings of a small number of elites than to the population at large does not seem to have occurred to him.
Keynes and Russell foresaw just one problem: A lapse into leisure might make us miserable.
To fix this, Keynes proposes nothing short of a moral revolution:
The jobs lost to automation, however, may not be worth mourning. Work these days is not just sterile ground for self-cultivation. It is a site of coercion. Most companies, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues in her remarkable Private Government, operate like communist dictatorships. Communist, because the firm (by definition) owns all the assets and organizes production through central planning rather than internal markets. Dictatorships, because at-will employment—the contractual norm in the United States—allows employers to fire workers for any or no reason, including their speech on social media, their haircut, their choice of sexual partner, or the inconvenient fact that their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss (the last a real-life example Anderson mentions). The infringements and invasions that are daily parts of modern work would be seen as impermissible violations if demanded by a government instead of an employer. Hence some people, such as the British work-refusers recently profiled by the sociologist David Frayne, have tried to subsist outside the workplace in part or altogether.Accompanying this crisis of work is a crisis of leisure. Americans spend their time off work in unfocused restlessness. Passive amusements dominate nonwork hours, with television consuming the lion’s share of leisure. (American adults watch, on average, 2.7 hours of TV a day, according to US Labor Department surveys; a recent study by Nielsen pegged that figure at more than five hours daily.) And distraction, especially the states of minimal absorption encouraged by browsing on the Internet, is an enemy of both work and high-quality leisure. The slothful withdrawal that characterizes our off hours, coupled with the well-documented weakening of local and community ties, has dispiriting civic implications. The number of Americans who spent 2016 reclining on their beds or sofas, laptops perched on their stomachs as they watched a vulgar demagogue seize power, almost certainly stands in the tens of millions.
Recreational pursuits more demanding than fleeting digital absorption are, increasingly, acts of consumption. Leisure is not something you “do” but something you “buy,” whether in the form of hotels and cruises or Arianna Huffington–vetted mindfulness materials. The leisure industry provides work for some while promising relaxation to others, for a fee.
The sorry state of leisure is partly a consequence of an economy in which we are never fully detached from the demands of work. The category of “free” time is not only defined by its opposite (time “free” of work); it is subordinated to it. Free time, Theodor Adorno warns, “is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor.” Free time is mere recovery time. Spells of lethargy between periods of labor do little but prepare us for the resumption of work. Workers depleted by their jobs and in need of recuperation turn to escapist entertainment and vacuous hobbies. And the problem of figuring out when work is “over,” in an economy in which knowledge workers spend their job hours tweeting and their evening hours doing unpaid housework and child care, has never seemed more perplexing.
The prospect of a “postwork” future has spurred renewed support in some quarters for a universal basic income provided by the state. Such proposals have made modest inroads in Europe: Last year, Switzerland put an unconditional monthly income plan to a national vote (finding 23 percent of the electorate in favor), and Finland is testing basic income schemes with a 2,000-person pilot study. The case for basic income has more recently been taken up in the United States, and not just by proponents on the left. Some libertarians and technology-sector leaders have come to see basic income as a way to quell the discontent that structural unemployment and growing wealth inequality might otherwise unleash.
The outcome of today’s push for basic income is far from clear. (The agenda will likely make no strides during the Trump administration.) And blithe predictions about the “end of work” and the consequent need to rethink leisure are often misleadingly simplistic: Analysts such as James Livingston and Yuval Noah Harari routinely understate the obstacles standing in the way of schemes like basic income in large, ethnically diverse countries, and ignore the likelihood that widespread automation will make people feel more precarious and harried (because of the need to cobble together an income from whatever short-term freelance work they can get) rather than less.
The truth is that we need to rethink leisure (however little of it we may possess) regardless of whether paid labor remains the center of our economic structure. (...)
The Idle Future
“The idea that the poor should have leisure,” wrote Bertrand Russell in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” “has always been shocking to the rich.” Along with John Maynard Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” published two years earlier, Russell’s essay, in which he argues for a four-hour workday, represents a serious attempt to understand what the future could hold for work. If the Victorians’ fanatical devotion to work was passing away, what would replace it?
Russell suspected that for British society in the 1930s, a radically diminished workday was already within reach. That the British populace did not already enjoy a deliciously idle society struck the philosopher as the result of deliberate political choices that overworked half the population and left the rest “to starve as unemployed.” He points to the apparent flexibility of the British labor market during World War I. All the men and women connected with the war effort—serving in the armed forces, working in weapons production, engaging in spying and propaganda—were for the war’s duration withdrawn from productive work. Yet general living standards were higher than ever.
The Therapeutic Three-Hour Workday
Keynes, for his part, saw the leisurely future of England and the United States as an inevitable byproduct of already-visible economic trends. “Mankind is solving its economic problem,” he declares; “the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years” (emphasis in the original). Where Russell predicted a four-hour weekday, Keynes suspected that just three hours would suffice. The “age of leisure and of abundance”—an age, he implies, that all of humankind will enter together—is on the cusp of emergence. Meeting material needs was a collective problem shared by the human race. That the economic gains brought about by technology might accrue more to the capital holdings of a small number of elites than to the population at large does not seem to have occurred to him.
Keynes and Russell foresaw just one problem: A lapse into leisure might make us miserable.
“To those who sweat for their daily bread,” Keynes observes, “leisure is a longed-for sweet—until they get it.” Inactivity runs against our nature. By acquiring wealth, we lose the economic need that spurs us to work and create. Prosperity, Keynes warns, could precipitate a widespread nervous breakdown. His suggestion of a three-hour workday is not an economic proposal but a therapeutic one: because of our deep habituation to work, for “many ages to come…everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.”Who is the happy idler, according to Keynes? “No country and no people,” he warns, “can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.… It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents to occupy himself.” People with talents will find their leisure time easily accounted for. But ah, he sighs, “how few of us can sing!” Most of us, cut loose from work and its accompanying rituals and social ties, will be left vacantly unoccupied.
To fix this, Keynes proposes nothing short of a moral revolution:
We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things.Once freed from the pressure of economic need, society could transform its values and look upon the love of money as a “disgusting morbidity.”
by Charlie Tyson, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Summer Idleness: Day Dreams, J. W. Godward via Wikipedia
