The Economics of Leisure

Can leisure build companies and nations?

I was watching my favourite movie on Mubi last night. A shot from the movie, “Taste of Cherry”, was beautifully framed by my TV for just a few seconds and yet stays vivid in my mind even now, after many hours, and probably for many years. The movie was about a man who looks well-off, has spent his life working hard, and is now searching for people whom he can hire to help him with his suicide. The movie travels with people who don’t accept the ‘work’ despite understanding the man, for reasons like hardship, guilt, religious sentiments etc. A father of an ailing daughter accepts the task and commits himself to it, but not without his moral dilemmas. As I was watching the movie, I felt, the conversations on life and its purpose lacked a newness. What struck me was the way work was depicted in the movie — the commitment of humans to work, the kind of work humans accept to do, the moral conundrums behind it, the way work is woven with needs, desires, aspirations, societal conditions, and the personal reasons work feels futile. The director has worked thoughtfully to place a beautiful image — an image of a lonesome cherry tree with a barren Iranian landscape as a background — along with these complex thoughts. For me the tree depicted my feeling of contentment on spending my leisure watching a movie that showed me a view from a new lens or perspective, the beauty in barren lands, the elusive purpose in life, and the understandings the movie gave me that I carry with me and revisit subconsciously without any effort at various moments in my future.

It is not just our work, our leisure too works for the nation.

I also began to think how my leisure and the way I spend it is valuable for several companies — The TV makers, Internet Connection Providers, OTT Platforms, furniture makers. These companies together create a digital ecosystem that blurs the boundaries of teams, domains, businesses, geographies, ideologies, and relationships. My simple act of watching a movie helps in sustaining so many successful companies. If I work for 70 hours a week, I can’t watch TV. I will also stay away from social media platforms, e-commerce platforms or offline stores. I won’t pay much attention to advertisements or use my phone much. Of course, I’ll possibly grow unhealthy, depressed, lose friends, and hurt loved ones. The businesses I’ll support are restaurants and cloud kitchens that deliver food, food delivery apps, and probably hospitals that can provide their services online. If everyone works as hard as founders of some Indian Software Companies, the most successful companies in the world, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Sony, AT&T, will lose their customers so drastically that the economies might crumble, and possibly starting an Armageddon or the end of Kaliyug! Isn’t that how apocalypse looks like in a capitalist world — crumbling economies and nations struggling to stay built? ……….

Is my self-defined by my work? Is it not defined also by the way I spend my leisure?

My leisure is not just about my idea of self, but also my data and digital persona as perceived by the hyper-connected digital ecosystem. My act of leisure provides it huge amounts of personal data, including my interests, political views, biases, habits, that together with others’ data define consumer needs, behaviours, business strategies, and hence economic growth. Economics deal with transactions — these transactions are not necessarily financial, they may be defined by time, technologies, hobbies, and feelings too. We need a little time for ourselves to consume others’ work too.

The data that my leisure provides to software innovators, creators, and maintainers of the digital realm, is also used to train AI tools. Unlike the tools of industrial revolution, these tools can potentially decrease complexities and duration in work that exerts human minds. About 90 years ago, philosopher Bertrand Russel, in his essay, In praise of Idleness, wonders that the concept of hard work and its necessity has not been adapted to the then modern world. He argues, “Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small, privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the (human) community.” The relevance of this statement must have increased manifold now when AI and other novel technologies have simplified and streamlined even the most complex tasks. Digital solutions like software products and platforms either offer entertainment, minimize the time it takes for several tasks, or reduces the complexities of tasks. If a software developer operating in the B2B space, provides solutions to other businesses where the solutions fail to reduce the long working hours of employees in the customer’s company, then can we call the software maker’s work successful and purposeful? This is a big issue, as identified correctly by the late American anthropologist, David Graeber. When the purpose of technologies is to make life more comfortable, and simple comforts are defined not by possessions, but by the right to leisure, then do these digital innovations serve any purpose at all? Won’t this perpetuate the feeling of impending failure? Won’t such software developers then consider themselves involved in what Mr.Graeber calls Bullshit jobs. What meaning and purpose does the latest advancements serve, when humans still need to expend long hours at offices at the cost of their health and collective peace?

Even if my leisure is justified, some questions are worth asking. Was I wasting my time away when I was watching a movie or enjoying my leisure? I’m a writer and I love working hard. The satisfaction of working till my head feels heavy of having achieved a milestone pushes me away from leisure and towards work. If I spend 70 hours next week writing about 25 articles (assuming they all turn out great), and post them here, will you read them? Will you read at least a few unless you work much less than 70 hours a week and choose to spend your leisure reading what I write? Is it safe to say that you need leisure to give meaning and purpose to others work too? Would you have read my rant if you were working for 12 hours today?

Often leisure in appropriate amounts is necessary. When leisure commands one’s success at work, are leisure and work mutually exclusive? Can’t we consider ourselves enjoying our leisure as well as working. Isn’t that what we all aspire to? And doesn’t this erase all the boundaries of time and make it possible to work for 70 hours or even 140 hours as some claim?

How will you define work, leisure, and the boundaries that separate them?

As a freelance writer and a content creator, I write blogs, articles, create presentations, training materials, and marketing content for corporates. I’ve been writing for a couple of years now, and I believe I could continue to write because I also invest my time and money reading books on varied subjects — art, philosophy, social sciences — that seem unrelated to my work. However, I believe I can write because I read. This belief extends my work to my leisure or rather joins them together and erases the boundaries.

Currently, I’m reading a book — The Rasa Reader — translated and edited by Sheldon Pollock, who is the general editor of ‘The Murty Classical Library of India’. The library was funded by Rohan Murty, son of Shri. Narayan Murty and Smt. Sudha Murty, and thanks to his ‘work’, I could take the first steps in understanding and interpreting classical Indian literature. The book like many others provide me thoughts, ideas, arguments, perspectives, interpretations, and a deep dialectical thinking foundation that defies over-simplistic details like the large number of hours successful ‘men’ contribute while building their businesses or the nation in their opinion.

Time to observe, Time to reflect

It is not just reading and writing that I engage myself in. Apart from taking up a significant share of household chores and parenting responsibilities, I make art, work out, and take time everyday to look out of the windows. I often stare at the breeze from our window, the clouds that slowly move with it, the birds defying the breeze, the pockets of green trees swaying and measuring the speed, the buildings that contrast organic movements, and I search for rainbows when the breeze brings with it rains and drizzles. I organize my writing better when I’m not looking at my computer screen and actively writing(typing). I believe in the possible truth of the story about Newton sitting under an apple tree, then a falling apple led to the greatest epiphany, a revelation that took birth in his leisure, which shaped science and our understanding of the world. Will I come up with such great ideas? I can’t say, but whatever I come up with, the roots also lie in such moments of stillness and worklessness.

When I’m reading or just staring outside, I’m working, or I haven’t stopped working. As I regularly work from home, spatial boundaries do exist and help me with working better. I work from my office (a room in our home) and watch movies and read books in our living room. However, this not true about my boundaries of time and work. This applies for others too, not just those working from home, though some find it easier when the boundaries are walled in their minds too. Numbers and data are more relevant in the realm of software products and factory operations. While work is often quantified in number of working hours, data in this case, clearly speaks very less about your achievements, intentions, productivity, success, ambition, or even commitment to work.

Counting the number of hours is hence unnecessary and is ill-suited to the modern work as David Graeber argues. The astonishing thing about refraining ourselves from rushing at work, even the creative ones, is that it brings out the best out of us. In the poem, “An Ode to Indolence”, the poet, John Keats resists the pull of three figures — Love, Ambition, and even Poesy, to favour lazing about on a drowsy summer morning. His choice is not just pleasurable, but resulted, surprisingly, in reaching his poetic ambitions. Here’s the poem for you to enjoy at your leisure.

Ode on Indolence

BY JOHN KEATS

‘They toil not, neither do they spin.’

One morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowèd necks, and joinèd hands, side-faced;

And one behind the other stepp’d serene,

In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,

When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again; as when the urn once more

Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;

And they were strange to me, as may betide

With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not?

How came ye muffled in so hush a mask?

Was it a silent deep-disguisèd plot

To steal away, and leave without a task

My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;

The blissful cloud of summer-indolence

Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;

Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower:

O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense

Unhaunted quite of all but — nothingness?

A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d

Each one the face a moment whiles to me;

Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d

And ached for wings, because I knew the three;

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,

And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye;

The last, whom I love more, the more of blame

Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek, —

I knew to be my demon Poesy.

They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings:

O folly! What is Love? and where is it?

And for that poor Ambition! it springs

From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;

For Poesy! — no, — she has not a joy, —

At least for me, — so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence;

O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

And once more came they by: — alas! wherefore?

My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;

My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er

With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:

The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,

Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;

The open casement press’d a new-leaved vine,

Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;

O Shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!

Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise

My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;

For I would not be dieted with praise,

A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!

Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more

In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,

And for the day faint visions there is store;

Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,

Into the clouds, and never more return!

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