Ennui
By “the problem of leisure,” Stuart Whatley in the New Statesman (a generally left-wing periodical) refers to the idea that most people wouldn’t know how to spend their time if they no longer had to go to work. Or, worse, that they would spend it deleteriously. It’s the “lotus-eater” theory in which we all become the obese layabouts of WALL-E. I’ve always found this to be a deeply conservative and patronising position. My position is that, after a period of idling, most people will want to act, to help themselves and the world in some way. But what if I’m wrong?
Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a reckoning, and it cannot be understood without reference to misspent leisure.
Whatley worries, basically, that the nihilistic politics that led to Trump and Vance in the US (and to Starmer and, perhaps inevitably, a PM Farage in the UK) and to an inward-looking rejection of optimistic internationalism, was caused by an ennui inherent to increased and misspent leisure time coupled with a lack of interest in boring or bullshitty work.
I’d argue that leisure time isn’t increasing, not in recent years anyway. It increased over the 20th Century for sure, thanks to well-organised labour movements, but we’re in the gig economy now, where, for many, every hour has some small cash value and must be hungrily seized upon as a matter of survival. I can’t deny, however, the sort of alienation from work he describes seems to be increasing (it’s certainly why I wanted to escape) and the likelihood that some people fall into a Leisure Trap of “an endless stream of video content or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix.”
It’s the reason, I think, that there was no post-pandemic cultural renaissance comparable to the last century’s interwar years. We didn’t have it bad enough in the pandemic. Netflix and YouTube made it just about acceptable to be stuck indoors all the time. Some people even preferred life that way. I’m forced to accept that the ennui Whatley speaks of probably exists.
And yet he does not give up on my sort of optimism:
Yet solutions to the problem of leisure exist throughout our own wisdom tradition, which stresses the value of friendship (Epicurus), contemplation (Aristotle), and “other-regarding” public service (Cicero). These basic human goods have been severely eroded, producing an age of loneliness, inattention, and ginned-up tribalism; but each could be reclaimed with sufficient free time and a proper command over it. While there will always be demagogues, conspiracists, and cult leaders, they would have no purchase over a people who can find fulfilment in themselves.
*
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
Hi, Rob,
I think most people actually want to work but want their work to mean something. If there’s en masse alienation from work, I’d like to believe it’s because the conditions are generally so grueling and/or dehumanizing (unfortunately too often its both) that work gets assigned many negative attributes. But I think that deep in most people is the desire to contribute to society in some positive way. Unfortunately, at some point it was decided that wage slavery was the best way to harness that.
And if people engage in what one could call non legitimized leisure, it’s got to be at least in part because the grueling, mind-numbing, dehumanizing work saps all but the barest energy to take care of other things people prize. Not to mention the absolute tsunami after successive tsunami of mindless dross that is often the only or the only-too-accessible source of leisure pursuits that fills in the bit of time many leave themselves for perhaps higher pursuits.
This isn’t at all meant to be an apology for our current conception of work nor for the maddeningly high rate of intellectual and aesthetic complacency amongst our fellow humans. But the odds are so stacked against having a largely enlightened and self-actualized citizenry that it’s impossible to leave zero room for believing that we could be happier, healthier, and more well-adjusted individually and collectively if we just had the conditions to favour it.
It’s definitely true that people want to make a contribution. Almost anyone would. It’s the way that work is currently organised along the wage system that is the problem. That and Taylorist division of labour and the abolition of meaningful personal agency over how we spend our time.