We've Already Stopped Baking Bread

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Category: Mind Over Matter

Created on Monday, 26 October 2020 14:36

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For the last five months many Americans have found themselves with a wealth of unstructured time, something pined for in harried, pursuit-driven working hours but in practice is pawned off for a recycled streaming show and hapless Twitter debates. We don’t know how to face leisure. This historically formative time once revered as “sacred idleness” or “uncut diamonds” is treated more like triage for our day of work with the basest of recuperative measures. The morning’s ambitions of breaking open that novel, picking up the guitar or cracking the code of the sourdough starter becomes daunting in the evening hour burn-out, so when Netflix asks: “do you want to keep watching?” we answer with a resounding, anxiety-deafening “hell yeah.”

Today’s notion of leisure as “time free from work,” is a far cry from what it once was. Until the last 50–100 years, it was a spiritually fundamental aspect of human life. In Politics Aristotle wrote: “This is the main question: with what one’s leisure is filled.” He and other ancients understood leisure as the time to contribute to the highest pursuits: reading, writing, and philosophy. In medieval times it was seen, as one historian describes, as a “receptive attitude of mind that contemplates reality.” In the early 1800s, the evening leisure hours for most were a precious reprieve from the backbreaking work of farming and were spent reading, singing and playing instruments, playing cards and other games, and all in the companionship of loved ones. It wasn’t until the last 50 years that leisure became work’s foil.

Pour through the writings of great thinkers and writers throughout history and the picture gets fuller. Hobbes called it “the mother of philosophy.” Virginia Woolfe warned “If you are losing your leisure, look out! — It may be you are losing your soul.” Henry David Thoreau said, “He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.” And as early as the 1st century Ovid wrote, “In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.”

According to the leisure time survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics the “kind of people” Americans are, are those that spend an average day watching 2 hours and 47 minutes of TV, 25 minutes playing video games or on the computer, and 17 minutes “relaxing or thinking.”

This is what German philosopher Josef Pieper called “the concupiscence of the eyes.” In 1948 he wrote his manifesto, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, a damning condemnation for the culture of work he believed was commodifying the worker. When post-war Germany galvanized behind the rebuilding of a nation, he saw a distortion developing in their work-life balance. Overexertion in work became the new norm, personal esteem was placed in the value of one’s labor (not virtue, honor, family, faith, reputation) and human dignity, as he saw it, was eroding.

Men and women weren’t the only casualties, time was also a victim. Pieper believed that once man and woman became “worker,” the way time was viewed would shift. Each minute, like each person, would be regarded by its profit and corrupt the spirit of leisure. Instead of a ”celebration of life,” leisure would become a “ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind their papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness.”

It’s a harsh critique of a culture that really does need to recuperate from work. Since Pieper first diagnosed the problem, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400%, and while 134 countries have made laws setting the maximum length of the workweek, the U.S. has not. Americans are not only working longer hours than at any other time in history (since statistics have begun monitoring it) but they are working more than any other industrialized nation. And with the advent of tools like Slack, Hipchat, Asana, etc, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to “clock out,” motivated as we are to distinguish ourselves by a tireless capacity for availability.

This culture of work subsumes everything as secondary and in service to work, leisure being first to go. The moments of our day become less of a mindful state of being and more of a series of to-do’s where each minute becomes a challenge in efficiency and goal-achieving.

For Satya Doyle Byock, a Portland-based psychotherapist who specializes in millennial and gen-z clients, this problem comes up a lot.

“To be an American or a modern person is to have a distorted relationship with leisure.” she explains, “We’re looking at people who have been raised in a culture with a really heavy emphasis on what can be quantified, measured, and weighed, versus quality: quality of a relationship, quality of companionship, quality of food, quality of time spent versus the amount of time spent.”

For “productivity-fetishists” (Pieper’s term), the mark of success is exhaustion and any surplus energy at the end of the day signals negligence in work. Something as dispensable as reading (without a book club), the cultivating of hobbies lacking social cache, or tackling a new recipe without the lure of an enviable gram pic is never going to make the cut when these activities have any capacity to agitate an already overwrought adrenal system. Even staying emotionally present to the moment or processing one’s day can be an over-taxing emotional luxury for burned-out minds. What never taxes us? Two hours and 47 minutes of Parks and Recreation. And that’s how the opus of our day is reduced to mere recuperative hours punctuating a workday. The summit of our purpose, our isolated time for intellectual, spiritual, contemplative achievement is sidelined for an endless scroll of a mouse.

We may think neglecting our leisure is not a big loss. Certainly in the line-up of addiction, depression, anxiety, and suicide all at their highest rates, the “leisure” distortion is not going to rank high on the list of psycho-social dilemmas. But what we are doing to repair our minds and bodies for another day of work is probably closer to numbing than recuperation. We’re creating for ourselves what Pieper would call a “fraudulent world.” One that safeguards us from every possible agitating stimulus, but also, as he suggests, “the truth that discloses itself only in silence.”

For the clients that are looking to be engaged in restorative activities, this is a “truth” Byock encourages her clients to look for.

“I think this honestly requires a full self-assessment, which is why it’s probably so scary. I think it requires asking oneself the question, probably over and over again, and probably when feelings of anxiety and depression arise: why do I want to escape from my life? What small things could be changed so that I don’t feel the desire to escape? What large things are intolerable to me? What’s stopping me from having the courage to make these changes? Often these questions aren’t easy. They may go back to healing childhood traumas, for instance. An unfortunate truth for many, many of us. Some of the answers might be hard, and some might be rage at a society that traps so many people in cycles of survival versus anything approaching thriving. But the larger issue is how people can reclaim lives that feel meaningful and joyful to be living in.”

It’s possible that for many of us the “concupiscence” is a willful choice to remove oneself from disturbing, anxiety-inducing thoughts or realities. I spoke with several other psychotherapists for this article who actually prescribe measures like binge-watching television for such a purpose. But for many of us, like myself, it could be that this concupiscence happened slowly, or unknowingly. It was five minutes on Instagram that became 30, every night. It was one binge-week to finish The Mandalorian that became a perennial tv watching habit. It was an isolated ASMR video that turned chronic.

This capitalistic pause is an opportunity for a reset. In the past four months people have been baking, painting, knitting, embroidering, charading, guitar-picking, vinyassa-ing, to a degree rarely seen outside of the television era or a power outage. Board games, yoga mats and yeast are among the most popular items stocked up on in the toilet paper frenzy. Families are going viral together.

“In this last couple of weeks, for my clients who aren’t on ‘the front lines’ of this virus in some way or another, I’m seeing some chronically anxious and unhappy people suddenly emerge into joy in a way that they did not think was possible.” explains Byock, “For people who have been identified in various ways with unhappy work and stress and surviving economically, this return to seemingly endless ‘time off’ — versus time that is always about to be interrupted by the need to go to work or some other social function — has caused a dramatic physiological relaxation. Their bodies are relaxed into time in a different way and new rhythms and joy is being uncovered.”

Now that staying home is the appropriate thing to do, those normally governed by economic expectations are driven towards self-care and introspection. This is not an attempt to pull a silver lining out of a situation that has caused considerable grief, economic strain, loneliness, and fear for millions, but merely to point out that for many of us in the motors of capitalism, it quite literally took a quarantine for us to reconcile with leisure.

Pieper considered the ability to be at leisure one of the “basic powers” of the human soul.

“The power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”

Today we’ve become masters of our own leisure time. But the quarantine is changing and already has changed. Our former limitations are ending. Work is beginning. And already we’ve stopped baking bread.

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