Leisure Defined

Leisure Defined

Leisure is evolutionary, iterative discovery play that functions as an alternative investment vehicle for human capital. Leisure investments are made according to personal utility, with the desired returns of excellence, power, and liberty.

What does that mean? First, leisure is play. This meets the tests of experience, common sense and everyday language. Second, leisure is particular type of play – discovery play – implying that learning occurs through this play, and that there is another type or class of play to which leisure doesn’t belong. We’ll call this other sort of play “recreation”, and define it to be comfort play. The difference is that the discovery play of leisure is daring, self-expansive learning, while the comfort play of recreation is safe, self-affirming ritual. Third, because it includes multiple rounds (iterations), leisure is a process, a means to achieve an outcome. Fourth, there is a feedback loop, or this sort of sequential play wouldn’t be evolutionary in the sense that something learned in one round is accounted for and used in the next. This meets a second test of common sense, as feedback is a necessary element for any learning process.

Next, this playful sort of learning represents human capital investment. We might inquire what human capital is precisely, but conceiving of education (i.e. the learning process) as an investment is no stretch. Learning to ride a bicycle is a simple example of how we invest human capital in the discovery play of leisure to achieve some degree of excellence, power, and freedom: excellence of balance, power of autonomy, freedom of movement. The idea of employing capital in an investment is clear, as is the prudence of a diversified portfolio. Leisure is a secondary or alternative investment because our job is our primary human capital investment. This meets another plain language test, as it says that leisure is what we do when we’re not working. It begs the question of what work is – but also implies that whatever work is, it isn’t play. As we’ll see, this is no trivial distinction, however common-sense it may seem.

With its opening phrase, the second sentence of the definition gives us that crucial piece of the puzzle so far as understanding leisure is concerned: investment in leisure is made on the basis of personal utility. As previously noted, this means what is leisure for me isn’t necessarily leisure for you, and that there is no category or class of activity that necessarily is or isn’t leisure. You may love travel and hate gardening, seeing digging as work, not play; I may have opposing views and we’re both still right about what is or isn’t leisurely behavior. But there is more to it still because what’s leisure is so at that moment only, as personal utility is subject to change. Tomorrow, the gloss worn off, what was leisure may be work; contrariwise, dreary practice may morph into to newfound leisure. You may love traveling until you’ve been on the road for several weeks; I may take that long get my sea legs before coming to appreciate the charms of living light and loose. These changes in perspective may occur over the course of seconds, days, weeks, months, or years. They can fluctuate on a short time scale, but be stable over the long haul, as this is the lowest level or fractal root of the economic cycles, the micro- basis for macro effects.

The back half of the second sentence packs leisure’s punch. This is what leisure, Aristotle’s arête, is all about: excellence, power, and freedom. Excellence in any endeavor brings power; freedom follows. It’s that simple. We hear and say it all the time: you get out of an activity in proportion to what you put into it. Commit to the practice, and you can succeed. We even celebrate this idea in a jazz lyric “Nice work if you can get it, and you can get if you try”. That lyric sums up this essay. Leisure is where we find it, even at work. If matching leisure with power seems odd, consider how many celebrities have traded on celebrity status to obtain liberties beyond those of the average citizen? Better, consider the number of movie stars – professional players -- who have excelled in their field, and traded on that excellence in the power-fields of politics and public opinion. Here is Aristotle’s eudemonia. Evidence of link between leisure and power through excellence is right before our eyes. We only need look.

Having seen what leisure is, next time we’ll look at recreation.