Work and Leisure

Many people uncritically assume that the purpose of leisure is to get “re-energized” so that we can return to work and produce more efficiently. This attitude about leisure makes leisure ultimately about money, since the point of leisure is to make us better, more productive workers (and therefore, earners). This view is worth challenging, however. Perhaps things are precisely the other way around; we don’t engage in leisure and rest so that we can work, we work so that we can engage in leisure. 

One of the overarching themes of this course is that there are many crucially important aspects of living well that most of us are rarely reflective about. We uncritically assume that more money will automatically make us happier, and for this reason we work endlessly to get more of it, often at the cost of other things in life that money can never buy. If, however, we can learn to think critically about money, work, and leisure, we will be well on our way to learning to reason well about the things that matter most in life.

Text: Josef Pieper, “Leisure and its Threefold Opposition” 

Alternative Reading: Zena Hitz, “What is Time for?” in Plough