against work: for rest, reading and undirected creativity

Timothy Trayhurn

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world” — Bertrand Russell

“Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness” — David Hume

Bertrand Russell writes In Praise of Idleness that “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 community.” He writes also that “leisure is essential to civilization” and that humans emancipated from work “will not be tired in their spare time [and so] will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid”

I think readers will sympathise with this last statement. Work consumes eight hours of the day but it creates a hangover felt throughout the “eight hours for recreation”, as early work reform activist Robert Owens labelled it in 1817. On top, there are certain non-negotiables to do within those hours: the business of waking up; commuting; preparing food; caring; exercise; hygiene; household chores, and so on. Energy is as diminished as time. Understandably, that copy of Gravity’s Rainbow goes untouched. Or else the same two pages as the night before are courageously gazed upon before our allotted “eight hours rest”

We are overworked and under-stimulated. We should not feel the least bit guilty that it’s easier to use that one hour of low-energy free time to look at Instagram Reels than to read the kind of books that we love. We can, however, feel robbed

Russell wrote of “modern technic” while arguing for a four-hour workday in 1935. Work processes have not regressed since. Yet the eight-hour workday proposed a century before Russell’s essay persists a century after. Why?

It is more complex than a leisure class stealing time from workers, though this is clearly the case. In his article on play and biology, “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun”?, David Graeber asks

Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?

To begin answering this last question, Graeber proposes that the language of economics structures the attitudes of biology, and vice versa. Charles Darwin adopted the term “survival of the fittest” from proponent of laissez-faire economics, Herbert Spencer. Spencer in turn drew out Darwinian analogies for his economic and social theories. The apparent agreement between biological and economic forces made each set of ideas appear more true. As Graeber puts it, “competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe”

Social Darwinism, as it came to be known, was influential on policy and culture in the late-nineteenth century of Britain and the United States. It’s explicit association with imperialism, racism and eugenics means it is no longer cited by name but its effect is still felt today. Posing self-interest and cut-throat competition as scientific laws has birthed neoliberalism, Jordan Peterson, hustle culture and the novel-length pamphlets of Ayn Rand. Enshrined as laws, those activities which are done for their own sake — which are merely good in themselves — become existentially intolerable, as they do not tend toward some competitive advantage

Reading, for example, is tolerable only if its construed as self-improvement and thereby becomes a kind of work. Rest, pleasure and undirected creativity are demoted. They becomes necessary, at best; that is, necessary to recover from work, so that more work may be done

In his 1986 essay The Abolition of Work, bob black proposes "creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution... a collective adventure in generalised joy and freely interdependent exuberance"

 How is "play" different from leisure, which as  Theodor Adorno describes it, is merely the catch-all term for activities meant to recover one for more work? The word "play" is itself not unpolluted by work-speak. You can well imagine an 80-hour week consultant announcing over thumbnails of cocaine how he "works hard and plays hard"

Firstly, if leisure is ancillary to work, simply put, play is not. It is done for its own sake. It may well be done despite work. Secondly, if leisure is polluted with the energy hangover of work, then play is energetic. "Play isn't passive", writes black

Indeed, if my activities outside of work are meant only to recuperate me for work, why do I put a book at my bedside that requires dedicated concentration? I have just spent eight hours concentrating on work and another few on miscellaneous labours. I’m in no condition for it. Frankly, it’s liable to become mumbo-jumbo. Yet I’m compelled to do it anyway. And if circumstances conspire to give me a free, rested and solitary morning, the experience is different. I use that energy for its own sake

Graeber writes that “free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself.” Just so, Friedrich Schiller describes “the play drive” as the expression of overabundant energy “in a movement of carefree joy"

In a post-scarcity society, there arises a diminished concern with base reality and an increased concern with “semblance”, that is, art and literature. For Schiller this an end in itself: “Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays

Just as Russell wrote that “leisure is essential to civilization” so social historian Joseph Huizinga loftily asserts that “law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play”

According to these writers, playfulness is the topmost layer of human activity, or else its fundament. Either the wellspring or the end in itself to be strived for.

I once proposed a hypothetical post-work world to an extremely hardworking friend. He said to me that without his work he would fall into apathy and depression. I was sad to hear this. Not because his work gave him meaning, which I was glad for. Rather that I have known him since we were children and he had apparently forgotten that he used to be a musician. This is not even to rank his or any work against his or any musicmaking as worthwhile. I was just struck by the imaginative disconnect from a passion he had held until he started working. He could apparently not imagine returning to music in a spirit of pure playfulness.

Moreover, my friend pictured a post-work world as universally characterised by the malaise that he pictured for himself. I will admit this much: let’s say that a post-work world arrives tomorrow, the immediate aftermath would be a sharp rise in the share price of Netflix. People are burned-out. There would be a great period of torpor to correct that. 

However, to quote black again, "once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act." I see it as the the same principle that makes so many retirees’ gardens immaculate. I doubt they get to work on their gardens the moment they retire. Rather, they rest a while, before a need to apply themselves to something beautiful takes hold.

Alisdair Gray quotes from Samuel Johnson’s novel The History of Rasselas for the epigraph to his collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly. The quotation originally refers to the Great Pyramid of Giza, but Gray plays on the indeterminacy of the pronoun “it” to point the quotatation at his book:

It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must always be appeased by some employment. He who has built for use till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost of human performance that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish. I consider this mighty structure as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments.

Johnson himself is pessimistic about idleness. His novel concerns a prince who escapes a workless post-scarcity environment to go on a futile quest for everlasting happiness. Johnson’s vision of happiness is something static — indeed, idle — like Heaven. Gray, however, tacitly offers the obvious counterpoint: happiness lies in doing. Thus he vindicates his and all art

In a post-work world, people would build such pyramids. That is, they would engage in energetic acts done for their own sake. With infinite free time, everything could and eventually would be elevated to high arts: the arts of walking, Scrabble playing, leaf collecting, pancake frying…

Reading is not typically viewed as an art, although the great reader of our day, Alberto Manguel, has gone some way to redressing this. I imagine and am sometimes envious of the imaginary workless reader’s everday life. They wake up when they’re finished sleeping. Sip a coffee but merely for taste. Use the morning for reading poetry, as this is the best time for reading poetry. They go for lunch and a long scenic walk with the dogs. Often a friend joins them. They read some more. Perhaps a novel, perhaps something else. Something difficult from time to time, as it doesn’t matter if it takes two hours to read one page or if the effort of it makes them sleepy. They may sleep and come back to it

A friend once described Borges — who was perhaps the most well-read person to have lived — as the man with the most interesting interior life in the world. His duties as a librarian are said to have taken him two hours each day, leaving him at least six to read. The reader I imagine may or may or not aspire to Borges’s literary genius. More immediately they make an art of living their particular interior life

In the worst version of the real reader’s life, they work all day and are always too tired to read. That copy of Gravity’s Rainbow remains untouched forever. Dim stimulation is received from the distraction machine in their pocket. Time rolls on and their to-read pile becomes literally insurmountable. It’s a rather extreme tableau, but I have feared it for myself

In a world with work, it is necessary to find a middle-way. As a symbolic and practical gesture, for example, I try to always leave the house with a book, hence I designed the dust jacket and nearly always am wearing it. I try to keep a book at closer reach than my phone. This way I can read in the little pockets of freedom that populate the working day

slow learner is a kind of middle-way. I left my job to make it and now I work longer hours. Still, it provides me many sources of pleasure and creativity, such as writing this. We have managed to contrive a mode of “work” whereby we read our favourite authors to find design inspiration

We focus on tasks done instead of hours worked. There’s no set-in-stone ceiling on anyone's holiday. And while diligent work is rewarded like any other place of business, what really stands out is finding new ways to complete our tasks quickly, as to maximise our time for reading, pleasure, undirected creativity, as well torpor and sleep.


 

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