Time flies. We’re caught in a loop with no respite. Our senses are consistently harassed by an inexhaustible stream of ever extra demanding sounds and pictures that stimulate our needs and fears. Our consideration, fragmented throughout completely different undertakings, engagements and conversations, explodes into a large number of incompatible actions. In addition to incoherence and frustration, the consequence can also be an unshakeable sensation of being in need of time.
Lockdowns in the course of the pandemic exacerbated this sense, creating an imbalance between work time and leisure time. For some, distant working dramatically elevated the general period of time spent at work, whereas others loved lengthy intervals of suspended employment and unprecedented quantities of free time.
For the previous, not bodily commuting to work made the boundary that usually separates skilled and personal spheres extra porous. The power to earn a living from home creates an phantasm of freedom that thrives on the expense of leisure. In reality, time dedicated to work has continued to extend, with employees capable of full on-line duties at any time of the day or evening. Work’s vampirization of time mirrors a change that has been underway for a number of many years. Widespread digitalization has made work extra environment friendly, however it has additionally led to the assumption that the tempo of labor could be endlessly accelerated.
Issues have been very completely different for individuals who misplaced their jobs as a result of pandemic. The necessity to set up surprising leisure time fruitfully was all of the extra taxing when managed in cramped and crowded lodging. The proliferation of day off revealed how a lot we battle to make our free time productive, to make use of it as an actual alternative for private progress, to enhance ourselves, to progress, to realize readability. This confirmed a phenomenon of which we’re all conscious: as a society, we see leisure time as inferior to work time. It’s the time left over as soon as the essential issues have been handled – above all as soon as our revenue has been secured.
Seen as optionally available, secondary, superfluous time, leisure is barely valued whether it is entertaining, if it distracts us from ourselves, if it’s a easy relaxation permitting us to recuperate our power so we are able to get again to work. In its present type, subsequently, leisure is hardly as much as the duty of accommodating our existential considerations.
Significant leisure
Historic Roman cube. Picture by way of Wikimedia Commons
But the need to search out the which means in our lives was reenforced in the course of the pandemic. Lengthy, anxious hours got to understanding occasions and what they meant for us. However relatively than placing free time to good use and studying, finding out, gaining abilities and readability, despondency led many to distracting actions. The goal was above all to overlook what was occurring, to in some way escape a demoralizing prospect. Little question some individuals did handle to plan their surprising leisure time fastidiously and even typically accomplish tasks that may be unthinkable in regular instances. However the majority discovered it unimaginable to prepare their leisure as productively as work. Leisure, culturally equated with pleasure, leisure and forgetfulness, doesn’t appear to accommodate the hassle wanted to construct autonomy.
Dominant work values
This concept, very latest within the general historical past of labor, is inseparable in France from the brand new social rights that emerged within the twentieth century, significantly after liberation. Authorized ensures of labor and leisure time can function the inspiration for a set of skills, tasks and safe prospects that contribute to the private fulfilment of their beneficiaries.
However that mannequin is now present process fast transformation. It’s as if day off is being swallowed up by its personal strangeness, whereas the standard group of labor is reverting to its bizarre standards, that are and have at all times been these of the business world. Velocity, utility, profitability and materials effectivity are as soon as extra the upper markers of a sphere dominated by the rarity of products and the monopolization of revenue by a tiny minority. Decreased to their accounting worth, complete areas of the skilled world have steadily misplaced the capability to foster worker betterment, to not point out psychological steadiness. Pondering and being fulfilled are the final issues wanted in sure jobs.
Precarity and bullshit jobs
Anthropologist David Graber sheds mild on key features of this gradual commercialization of labor. He reveals how this evolution/regression leads inevitably to an expert world the place any type of existential quest is rendered nearly unimaginable. What he calls ‘bullshit jobs’ refers to people who are actually ‘absurd’, in different phrases, devoid of sense. A bullshit job is ‘a type of paid employment that’s so utterly pointless, pointless or pernicious that even the worker can’t justify its existence though, as a part of the circumstances of employment, the worker feels obliged to faux that this isn’t the case’.
‘Job’ affords comprising micro duties to be accomplished on-line are on the rise and are probably the most degrading side of this growth. Usually related to excessive precarity, these actions appeal to individuals so destitute that they’re prepared to sacrifice not solely their free time but in addition the time wanted to hold out important duties like consuming and sleeping. All their time is weak to being overtaken by work. Lives, barely worthy of the identify, are utterly vampirized by repetitive, meaningless micro duties, that are not more than items of time bought to algorithms which might be usually the one level of contact for these unlucky workers.
Twenty-first century slavery
Picture by way of Hippopx
Life circumstances resembling these of slavery are creating proper earlier than our eyes as a result of inhumane tendencies of an unfettered economic system. Bizarrely, this alienation appears to happen with the victims’ consent. The excesses of the nineteenth century’s nascent industrialization created comparatively consensual slavery conditions, however no less than these assaults on human dignity have been seen and spectacularly stunning, ultimately resulting in elevated political consciousness and radical reforms. Issues are completely completely different these days, when every little thing is shrouded within the silence of desocialized lives and survival relies on having time to promote.
Confronted with this type of extra, it’s unimaginable not to think about the ‘proper to withdraw labour’ to which the French Labour Code entitles workers within the occasion of ‘grave and imminent hazard to the worker’s life or well being’. Initially meant for hazardous conditions, this proper must also be relevant in the course of the bizarre course of life.
Historic Greek downtime and Roman productiveness
By updating the query of how we use free time, lockdown opened a spot within the move. Sitting down, respiration, reflecting on latest occasions, switching off, stepping again for some time to get higher, understanding – all appeared wholesome objectives.
In Antiquity ‘productive withdrawal’ was seen as the height of human existence. The Greek skholḗ and the Latin otium discuss with the potential of devoting oneself to thought whereas being freed from all non secular and materials bounds. It’s actually ‘free’ time within the sense that it refers back to the optimum stage of independence, detachment and period required for the human thoughts to have the ability to fulfill its respectable aspiration for fulfilment: to suppose, to study, to provide which means, to develop a set of morals, to analysis knowledge or fact – briefly, to find one’s personal causes for current, exsistere.
As Pierre Bourdieu writes, skholḗ is ‘the free time, free of the urgencies of the world, that permits a free and liberated relation to these urgencies and to the world’. It’s the time wanted for the self. Not an egotistical or narcissistic course of however a want to equip oneself with interiority and the required instruments for rational consciousness: the interior discussion board, free will, judgement, style.
Michel Foucault writes that ‘the principle “to be involved with oneself” was, for the Greeks, one of many predominant rules of cities, one of many predominant guidelines for social and private conduct and for the artwork of life’. In fifth-century Greece, humankind was ‘the measure of all issues’ (Protagoras). Human intelligence appeared to be the one basis of actuality. For the primary time in historical past, an understanding of the true and the hunt for knowledge and fact have been now not reducible to faith or custom however rested solely on purpose and the liberty to suppose freely – in different phrases, as Hannah Arendt articulates, the liberty to make a ‘behavior of analyzing and reflecting upon no matter occurs to return to move, no matter particular content material and fairly unbiased of outcomes’.
This skill is completely depending on the efforts of human intelligence and the skholḗ at its disposal. For Greek society, subsequently, removed from being an inessential luxurious, ‘productive withdrawal’ was probably the most valuable a part of life, each for particular person accomplishment and the destiny of the polis. The power to suppose for oneself enabled by ‘productive withdrawal’ was thought-about one of many circumstances for assuming one’s existential vocation and rejecting servitude.
Greenstone polyhedron inscribed with letters of the Greek alphabet, Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York. Picture by way of Picryl
After all, like in all places within the historic world, Greek society was unequal and skholḗ was usually reserved for residents – in different phrases, free males. Nevertheless, in contemplating purpose and knowledge as a common basis, Greek thought laid the groundwork for a course of that may ultimately result in intelligence being seen as a human proper. It was the Greeks who first attributed an existential dignity to ‘productive withdrawal’ and, subsequently, leisure time.
This heightened significance didn’t escape the Romans after they remodeled skholḗ into otium. Nevertheless, speculative pondering was nonetheless seen as inferior to utilitarian actions that yielded verifiable returns. Utterly at odds with the Greek mindset, this materialistic Roman perspective led to the devaluation of ‘productive withdrawal’ because the situation for knowledge. Regardless of its rediscovery within the Renaissance after which the Enlightenment, when Condorcet positioned it on the centre of his academic undertaking, otium was constantly seen as much less helpful than work. This reinterpretation of skholḗ by Roman tradition has persevered to the current day. Precedence is at all times given to work that ensures materials independence.
Otium’s return
Nonetheless, the continuing commercialization of the skilled world over the previous couple of many years raises a query about this dogma. Because the pandemic, many are satisfied that non-public fulfilment and the hunt for readability now not essentially require skilled dedication. Many younger working individuals are deciding to look exterior of labor for causes to stand up within the morning and provides a way of which means of their lives.
The second appears to have come to reclaim the existential energy contained in our ‘free’ time. This rediscovery may very well be a supply of political resistance. If society doesn’t see ‘productive withdrawal’ as worthwhile, it’s as a result of it prices nothing and fosters detachment from the mainstream – two objectives that battle with the business world, which dominates many societal spheres.
Commercialism imposes itself in sectors the place it ought to by no means have been allowed and the place its dangerous affect is evident: schooling, tradition, well being, the setting. Each day brings contemporary proof that these spheres can’t be surrendered to enterprise with out damaging their integrity. That is what we unconsciously imply after we say that well being, tradition or schooling are ‘non-negotiable’. Merely put, we lack the required ideas to grasp that the devaluation of free time additionally entails the devaluation of the life circumstances which might be important for pondering authentically about actuality.
Though the phrase otium itself has disappeared from our vocabulary, the common want it recognized is now returning with unprecedented urgency. The large commercialization of labor and the expansion of the eye economic system have turned the lifetime of consciousness, which for Historic Greeks was the inspiration of all freedom and rationality, right into a market worth. Not content material with merely negating otium, the enterprise world has remodeled it right into a negotiable commodity. The mass sell-off of our ‘out there mind time’ to advertisers on huge Web platforms has turn out to be one of the vital worthwhile companies in historical past. Evaporating earlier than the 1000’s of screens devoted to capturing it, time loses its worth and we discover ourselves prepared at hand it over unreservedly to every kind of speculators.
The combat for a common proper to otium might assist us reverse this dive into the abyss. Time, as Seneca stated, is certainly ‘our solely true possession’, and a productive use of time is the one solution to keep away from servitude. Lengthy thought-about an aristocratic privilege, otium needs to be seen for what it truly is: a human proper that might allow all of us to turn out to be the protagonists of our personal lives.
The questions addressed on this article are additional developed within the guide Otium. Artwork, éducation, démocratie (Actes Sud, 2020).
