One of the year’s most popular songs begins with the lyrics, “I’m so tired … just wanna go home.”
The song, “i’m so tired…” by Lauv and Troye Sivan, is actually about getting fed up with love songs and wanting to go home with someone. But most people can at least relate to what the title appears to mean. The average American gets less than 45 minutes of downtime each day, according to a recent study conducted by OnePoll. That means few Americans even have enough time to rest.
Additionally, the study reports that the average person gets into their ideal headspace only 3.5 days each week, which means a lack of downtime isn’t the only problem. We seem to be missing out on actual rest.
Carving out more free time won’t help us at all if we don’t understand the importance of leisure. Twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper distinguished between the concepts of free time and leisure in Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
“Idleness, in the old sense of the word, so far from being synonymous with leisure, is more nearly the inner prerequisite which renders leisure impossible: it might be described as the utter absence of leisure, or the very opposite of leisure,” Pieper wrote.
OK, so scrolling through Instagram isn’t leisure. What is?
“Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time,” he wrote. “Leisure is a form of silence.”
So, silently scrolling through Instagram? Not exactly. Pieper characterizes leisure as a state of the soul that quiets itself so it can intentionally consider the rest of the world. It sounds pretty heady, but what it basically means is that people don’t need “spare time,” little 15-minute breaks here and there, to become their best selves. They need to intentionally calm their minds and use them to celebrate the good in the world.
Call it meditation, call it prayer, call it recentering. Choosing leisure will certainly rejuvenate you and help you with your work, but treating leisure as the means to a more productive end destroys the point, Pieper argues. We work so we can enjoy leisure, not the other way around.
It may not be possible for busy people with jobs, partners, or children to find more free time. But the good news is that while our spare time appears to be so narrow, we can at least commit to spending it well.
