“We are ‘unleisurely’ in order to have leisure”
Aristotle
“For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”
Josef Pieper
It was the Hollywood party to end all parties. A blend of celebrity, money, and hedonism that propelled its host to even higher levels of fame (and notoriety).
You may not know who Dan Bilzerian is, or you may have followed him for years. He was catnip for the Instagram crowd. His profile and YouTube channel embodied a lifestyle beyond wildest dreams. The aforementioned launch party for one of his brands was all of the above and more.
Which makes Dan’s recent appearance on The Modern Wisdom podcast all the more surprising. The poster child of excess – more booze, girls, and drugs – went to rehab, got clean, and has settled into a monogamous relationship.
It is easy to be dismissive of Dan as a tail case – someone so hyperbolic that he has zero intersection with the real lives that we live.
Except it’s not true – we are each potentially the Dan Bilzerian of our own lives.
We may not have the desire nor resources to take life to such excess, but there is an appeal to a life focused purely on pleasure seeking. We know that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull fellow.” And who wants to be dull?
The question I have been pondering more recently is the inverse. What happens if Jack is all play and no work?
We live in a time and place where fun has come to dominate. The Wall Street Journal reported that the average German (German!) worked just 1,343 hours last year. Assuming 48 work weeks a year, that is only 28 hours a week.
For the first time in history, our fun is overwhelming our work or per Neil Postman’s turn of phrase, we are “amusing ourselves to death.”
This may sound like finger-wagging. This is only part of the problem – perhaps even more concerning is that our fun is of such low quality. For example, in 2023, the average internet user spent 151 minutes per day on social media.
Work is hard, but it at least offers the ability to feel accomplishment and pride in one’s efforts. We are increasingly trading that opportunity for doom scrolling – and increases in stress, envy, and countless other maladies.
What is the answer then?
We should let our work, be our work and our rest, be our rest. There are natural embedded rhythms of life that we should order our days around. The primary rhythm is the cycle of work and rest. We see this cycle reinforced in ancient traditions such as Sabbath rest – work 6 days and rest 1.
There is a tremendous amount of research to support that doing hard things is good for us! Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis is an excellent exposition about the capacity of humans to do hard things. Work helps shape us into better human beings – even when it is hard!
Without work, we will not become what we are capable of.
Work has a formative component that shapes our character. We are less fully human without its presence in our lives. Even in retirement, we should search for ways to be of service, even if its intensity is less.
We should also appropriately bound our work – workaholism is as problematic as under-working. We balance our work through rest.
Life is certainly more than one’s vocation. Leisure and rest not only provide balance to one’s work, but also create cognitive space to provide clarity and energy to re-engage. Josef Pieper, a German philosopher, makes the case in his lovely little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture that leisure itself provides the richness of life.
But what is leisure? Is it synonymous with fun?
Pieper contends that true leisure is something different. “Man too celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of the Creation” as Pieper wrote. Leisure includes a cessation from work itself, but is more than pure idleness. Instead, Pieper opines that leisure has a celebratory quality to it.
Leisure must look different for it to balance the intensity of work. It may involve space for quietness and stillness, to counterbalance the noise of our day to day. It should likely involve being outside – see the 5-3-2 rule. It may involve physical exertion – but for recreation not labor. It certainly is more than a never ending scroll on social media.
There is much to be gained by the right balance of work and rest. It is easy to veer to excess of work or leisure – far more challenging to keep them in balance.