Covid is making us rethink our relationship to work and leisure. Forgotten pastimes like jigsaw puzzles are popular again. Former pipe dreams now seem possible, maybe even likely: A universal basic income, a four-day work week, millions of us working from home permanently. Perhaps, the best consequence is our rediscovery of how great leisure is; how different our lives can be with more time for family, for pleasure and relaxation, and for learning.
Covid is (I hope) making us realize how important it is to enjoy our leisure. The truth is that if we don’t enjoy it, we get little from it: little rest, little fulfillment, and little learning. To truly accomplish something in our free time, we have to enjoy it. And that means taking the focus off of the accomplishment and placing it on the enjoyment. It means doing things because we want to, not because we feel pressure to “maximize” our time or be “productive”.
I had to remind myself recently why I started this podcast. I did it because I love to learn, and I love talking to interesting people about their passions. Sometimes even hobbies can become a grind if you’re not careful. There are things I didn’t think would be so much work when I started this project about a year ago: Reaching out to potential guests, growing an audience, creating and editing content. It’s the kind of thing that can get stressful, especially when my full-time job prevents me from working on the podcast as much as I’d like to. So, I’ve refocused my attention on the aspects that I enjoy most – the interaction and learning that I’ve discovered in doing this project. I’ve met some interesting people, had great conversations, and learned a ton! The result is that I stopped worrying about things like how many people listen to the show, and started appreciating the concrete benefits that come from it, like personal growth.
Enjoyment is a major part of my teaching & learning philosophy. From my first day in the classroom I’ve seen how enjoyment can be a major learning booster. I’ve seen kids who barely spoke a word of English shout out words like “father,” “swimming”, or “cucumber” to score a point while classmates cheered them on. I’ve seen students who told me they hated writing at the beginning of the semester create an inspiring blog, video, or email because they got to choose a topic and genre that interested them. And recently, I’ve heard guests of my podcast talk about how much they loved to do the things they learned, whether it’s cooking, coding, or improving houses. Enjoyment is a secret ingredient in successful learning.
I think our conflicted relationship with leisure is another reason why many of us don’t enjoy the things we do in our free time. It’s a moral framework that capitalism inherited from Christianity: Hard work is right and good, while idleness is evil, bad, or just plain not good. Business speak has even neutered the vocabulary we use to talk about our free time (ex. “maximize your time”, “be productive”). The resulting pathologizing of leisure is not good. Much of the work we do nowadays is not useful (or as some would say, “bullshit”). And much more of the work done in modern societies is done to support idleness. Bertrand Russell noticed this nearly a century ago:
Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was rendered possible only by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technic it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization (1932)
The pathologizing of leisure can be seen in contemporary self-guilt over how we’re all supposed to be spending our Coronavirus quarantine time. When we put pressure on ourselves to do something in our free time, we end up disliking it, whether it’s painting, language learning, reading, or whatever, even when it is something that we find enjoyable.
The bottom line is you’re probably not going to learn something in your FREE time if you don’t find a way to enjoy it. So ask yourself, what do I enjoy about learning and doing x? Or what can I enjoy about it? If you do, you’ll surprise yourself by finding pleasure in unlikely places. For example, since I started gardening, I’ve been looking up at the sky more (to get an idea of the angles from which the sun’s rays hit my plants).
We have to value our leisure as much, if not more than, our labour. My guests on the upcoming episode know how make use of this “work hard, relax hard” mentality. They are successful entrepreneurs who travel across Canada in their van.
Be sure to listen and if you don’t already, subscribe to the podcast (Apple, Spotify, Sticher, Google). And don’t hesitate to drop me a line below or on social media. After all, I’m doing this show to connect with readers such as yourself!