Diarist A01
Summer 2022 directive
The philosopher Henri LeFebvre argues that the concept of “leisure” is a creation of modern capitalism—an artifact of the alienation created when we sell our labor as an abstracted commodity rather than working for ourselves and working directly to satisfy our actual needs. Before the industrial revolutions, the line between work and leisure as we know it didn’t exist—people did their work (farming, making garments, working leather, blacksmithing, etc.) where they lived, and such “unpaid labor” that we recognize today (commuting, childcare, food preparation, etc.) was integrated into daily life alongside what was then non-alienated labor that either sustained our bodies (farming, hunting, etc) or created and sold crafts made with skills we had built up through home schooling or apprenticeship. People wouldn’t have conceived of vacations or days off, with the exception of the Sunday sabbath or annual harvest festivals, which were communal and laden with shared meaning, unlike our privatized PTO.
Of course this is all overstated, but nonetheless I am persuaded by the idea that the work/leisure divide is both artificial and a sign of the non-integrated way we live our lives.
Which is to say, I’m super-neurotically conflicted about leisure. I have this fantasy of having a fully integrated life where I write literary fiction in my free time and it’s joyful and energizing; and I move effortlessly between work-for-pay and various avocations, and just be this seriously effing healthy, balanced dude.
In reality it feels like a near-constant internal struggle. I get into a good groove with exercise for a couple weeks or months and then stuff happens and I haven’t exercised in days and my mood is down and I’m overwhelmed and ….
Or I have time off, and have been planning some writing time or reading time or playing guitar or something creative and engaging, and I’m just tired and have no juice and just watch TV, feeling a little disappointed in myself….
These experiences are punctuated by fleeting periods, lasting a few hours or sometimes a weekend, of relaxed self-acceptance, where I am content to let time flow and follow my nose from this thing to that. (This happens once in a while on a Saturday, or a Sunday, or a random off day). When I can do mindless things without self-judgment (goof around on social media, or watch baseball highlights, or read lightly in a magazine)….
Weekends are the biggest field for these inner conflicts. I’ll look forward all week to the weekend and then find myself at loose ends when it arrives. It’s better when my wife and I have social stuff set up, which prevents lengthy discussions about what to do & where to go (“How much do you want to see that movie? On a scale of one to 10? Do you want to make something nice at home or go out to dinner? Should we see if the goddamn Ellenbogens are free to hang out? It’s such short notice.” Bah!). Socializing is one activity my wife and I both really value; Covid of course put a wrench in it, and I’m not sure we’ve fully recovered, though we are socializing an appropriate amount now. (There is a way in which automatic social skills atrophied around the pandemic, at least for me, it seems, and now I sometimes have to push myself to get up for socializing, though usually I end up enjoying it.)
Sometimes weekends are fine. In the spring or the fall I’ll take long bike rides in the late morning/early afternoon on Saturday and end up feeling great. I’ve done well in recent years bracketing off a few hours per weekend for work (Sunday mornings, usually); accepting those few hours with reasonably good cheer and being efficient. Then I usually make myself a nice omelet and work in some exercise before spending the mid- to-late afternoons cooking. This is a really happy place—the Sunday afternoon kitchen time. I listen to two radio shows I like on Sirius XM and spend hours making one or two meals that will cover the first half of the week. Cooking is a creative outlet, feels grounded, positively, in physical reality, and I’m pretty good at it, with confidence and skills and a pretty admirable repertoire.
That’s the weekends. Then there’s the evenings at the end of workdays. Especially in the winter months, I frequently stew about what to do. Whether to watch TV, and what. After a day of work as an academic administrator, with much staring at screens, my eyes are tired and I often don’t feel like reading. (Covid and the ubiquity of Zoom meetings is playing a role in this). So, more often than not, I either watch TV with my wife—sometimes on something mutually agreed upon (when we can agree, which is a problem), sometimes super banal stuff, like Jeopardy or reruns of The Office or Parks and Rec…or she watches TV and I bounce around on the internet or read a book or a magazine, or listen to music on headphones. Sometimes I’ll go to the den and read, if the TV is distracting me. These give pleasure or diversion to varying degrees—if it’s something I really like on TV or a book that’s really captured me, it’s great, but that is pretty infrequent.
During baseball season, baseball games create a structure and a ritual and defuse some of this conflict. I follow games on my phone or listen to the radio broadcast (radio! Ha!) on the phone or the computer, or if my team is on TV I’ll watch. It’s actually more pleasurable on radio than TV—games are so long and slow these days. But I like the rhythm of the baseball season, of there almost always being a game. Even if it’s boring it’s a structure to leisure hours that I like.
Besides cooking (when I have time and can relax into it), the leisure activities that give me the most reliable pleasure include playing sports and cycling. As I’ve said I try to work these into my daily life. I’m in my late 50s so intermittent little injuries and flareups of chronic problems disrupt this. Playing tennis and racquetball are especially diverting (and especially hard on the bones & muscles & joints)—being both social and absorbing and fun, and I’m good enough to hold my own with reasonably good players. But I have chronic injuries related to these and have to partake of them moderately and with care. Cycling is the only solo exercise I really like—but I do really like it, and thus far haven’t had much trouble keeping myself “on the field,” as it were. Other exercise—cycling indoors in the winter months, working on machines at the Y, swimming, even walking outdoors—feel more like the discharging of a duty, though they pay benefits in mental as well as physical health, and I feel good when they’re done. And correspondingly I get depressed when I don’t exercise enough, which happens at busy times.
Oh yes and then there are two other important leisure activities: music and travel. I played in a band with some friends a few years ago—it was hard and stressful at times to find time but it was very sustaining most of the time. And I listen to music—while driving and exercising now and then and while cooking but also sometimes just for its own sake. Mostly jazz, or the 60s/70s era pop and rock I was raised on and still often feel quite connected to (Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder). Music feels substantial and meaningful to me, an aesthetic experience in the true sense—I take pleasure in it & I like to think about it. Music enthusiasm, no doubt, propelled me towards a career as a literature teacher and scholar—the pleasures of immersing oneself but also the intellectual pleasure of representing it, understanding it, advocating for it.
Travel involves a lot of the above, and has the further benefit of linking a lot of the things my wife and I both like to do, including food (not cooking, though we did take a cooking class in Florence once and it was super fun) but eating in good restaurants and great street food and all that; live performances (comedy and drama). We usually go to cities but have started doing some more nature travel recently. There are things I like more than she does (art museums, vigorous hikes, book stores) but this is an arena in which we’ve worked out our differences, and we tend to do well together on trips. And HELLO Covid messed this up as well, but it’s been coming back, and we had a great trip to Utah last summer, which also included some great socialization with some close friends who live in Salt Lake.
Which brings me to some unanswered questions. (Or implicitly answered ones).
To what extent am I able to unplug from work? To a certain extent (ha!). But, often, not enough, and this is a source of inner conflict. And to even say so—to even seek to “unplug”—is a reiteration of the cultural script about leisure/labor that LeFebvre was on to.
How do my daily rhythms change on days off and weekends? They do change. Sometimes there is no rhythm, and it’s a problem. Sometimes there is a rhythm (Sunday morning work/omelet/cook for the week, or the organic physical rhythm of cycling), and it’s great!
How important is it to have clear boundaries between work and leisure? LeFebvre, again. I both believe that the desire to separate the two is horseshit modern ideology, and desire it and seek it out. I try to compartmentalize. Sometimes it succeeds and it feels good. Sometimes compartmentalizing feels artificial and scripted and I feel like a tool of larger forces.
What do I need leisure to do for me? I guess what I really seek is absorption—in something that isn’t routine or banal or completely enmeshed in the daily necessities of work and life. A feeling of being both totally in the moment and involved in what’s before me, whether active (racquetball, good conversation) or passive/consumption (watching a play or a jazz pianist or a really good movie or book). Simultaneously completely absorbed and kind of transported, kind of outside the self but also at the same time totally involved, alive to what I’m sensing and active in response to it.
The thing this exercise points up more than anything is that I have a lot of things I want to do, and a lot of demands, and these come into conflict. At the same time, I don’t want to retire—I want to stay engaged in the actual world and contribute. Or do I? A life of leisure doesn’t seem adequately meaningful, and the prospect of volunteering and serving on boards raises the existentialist spectre that all we’re really doing here is filling up time. So…yeah. Leisure.