Why Study Leisure?

The story of leisure is the history of civilization. As the basis of culture (see Pieper), leisure underlies all philosophy, art, and science. Its understanding therefore requires a systems approach capable of linking philosophy, economics, biology, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and more. It also means that leisure’s application touches every human endeavor. This doesn’t mean we need to be experts in every field to improve our appreciation of leisure, only that we be willing to radically reconsider of our everyday notions of work and leisure, and therefore of reality.

Content with the world as it is, the reader may ask, “Why bother?” There are two good reasons. First, understanding leisure in an interdisciplinary way can help us frame the problems of any single discipline more constructively, relating them to other branches of study, and so helping find innovative solutions to the problems of the world as it is. Second, if people better understand the rules of the economic game they are playing, they may make better decisions, live better lives, and so create a better world. As this sounds rather pie-in-the-sky, like something out of a Miss America speech, let me be provocative: all of economics is but part of leisure’s compass. Homo ludens (see Huzinga) plays with economic ideas until they make enough sense for Homo economis to buy and employ. Marxism is pathology of leisure, both economically and philosophically. Between Aristotle and Dewey, to the small extent it addresses leisure, most philosophy is pathology too; since Dewey, the same. Veblen noted the illness, but little more. We can no longer afford these misunderstandings, as poor human capital management puts civilization itself at risk. We study leisure to save ourselves.

What do I mean by all that? How exactly is civilization at risk? How can those other assertions be true, and who am I to say? Answering those questions is the point of this book – and it’s a long book. It’s long because there is more packed into the idea of leisure than meets the eye. Unpacking it will require lots of simple steps: take the item out of the pack, turn and put it neatly on the shelf, turn back and repeat. That’s more or less the plan of this book.

My appreciation of leisure came through a step-by-step process -- many of them backwards – that led me a bit off the beaten path. My goal is to walk the reader through that process with minimal back-tracking. Like a guide who works day-hikers up a mountain so that they can appreciate the view, I’ll save the scenic byways for the trip down. There will plenty of necessary switchbacks on the path up, and plenty of tempting side trails too, but those must wait or like most aspirants, we’ll never summit. Such is the discipline of leisure. As for the fog-shrouded summit that’s our goal, it’s easily approached by this common-sense route: leisure is where you find it. But to scale the final promontory we have to defy the gravity of seeming contradiction: even if you find it at work. How that can be, what it implies, and what it reveals – including unexpected threats to civilization – we'll explore in this blog.