Time poverty
Now slow is not lazy but this book is worthwhile.
Gini, Al. The Importance of Being Lazy: In praise of play, leisure and vacations., Routledge, 2003, New York
This well-researched book is a great place to start to learn about the slow lifestyle. Al Gini is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He’s also a business consultant. He previously explored a mixture of business, work, and philosophy, in his book My Job, My Self. Be warned, he describes himself as addicted to work.
The Importance of Being Lazy is about personal identity in culture. Our most frequent response to the question, “who am I”, is to say what we do for a living. The book is about who we are and what we do when not at work. Professor Gini’s own university has only a few books on leisure but thousands on work, jobs, and careers. We value work, we don’t value leisure.
If vacations are a project of self-definition, then what does it mean to not even take vacations? Vacation starvation becomes a malady. The consequences, as Josef Pieper pointed out, is the destruction of culture. The idea of leisure time was to refresh and renew to have a life outside of work. But market forces have largely been against this.
Adam Smith said, “Consumption is the sole purpose of all production.” Al Gini says, “To Shop is to be. “ Our culture has degenerated from a society based around people to those around things.”
There are five problem areas:
1.Lack of Self Development. Without adequate time and energy we become passive consumers of entertainment. This makes us dull.
2. Lack of Autonomy. Time away from constraints and conformity of work is necessary to build a more authentic sense of self. Spending all our time at work makes us compliant, and often against our own best interests.
3. Effects of Social Life. Less time means more superficial interactions with others. Lack of social involvement degrades our social environment. We are too busy to be courteous. We are too busy for civic involvement.
4. Positional Competition: In other words, “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Our focus is on the superficial. We self identify through our buying habits.
5. Cognitive and Valuational Confusion. You might expect a title like this from an academic (and a word like valuational!). However, the book is wonderfully free of academic writing.
What does Professor Gini mean? Advertisers create discontent by holding up impossible promises and standards to which consumers aspire.
Professor Gini cites a host of thinkers including, Hegel, Kipling, William James, Marcuse, and Aristotle. My own favorite is Mark Twain, “I do not like work even when someone else does it.”
We need to find a balance between work and leisure. We are responsible for at least some of the choices we make. The notes are a wonderful resource for further reading.
Sounds like a very worthwhile book. I particularly like point number 1: self-development, although I wonder how many people go on holiday to develop themselves. In some sense, point number 1 envelops the remaining points, or is their outcome.
It is sad that in the Western world we are bombarded with messages warning us of being poor when we are old or sick, of not having savings, insurance, investments, or pensions. The fear this engenders discourages us from spending money on holidays and leaisure, since these are not tangible “investements”. Yet many people are happy to accrue debt to pay for an education, without recognising that to travel, or to be at leisure, is to learn; about another land, one’s own land, and oneself.
Ironically, such messages are often in close proximity to an advert encouraging us to get a loan to finance the lifestyle we want - spending money on crap, it seems.
Hi Phil,
I apologize for not writing more often, I’m working on a longer piece of fiction. It’s a sort of Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy meets P.G. Wodehouse (about golf).
Thanks for the response. While vacation is often look, shop, flop, I think there are those that go to other places to learn something. Probably the most popular is to take a language course. I just spent the weekend at a retreat devoted to somatic education and this is definitely concerned with self development.
I agree, fear is just about everywhere. But the saving grace is we can make our own environment to a large extent. We can make smart choices: choices that construct our private lives which have meaning to us as unique individuals. To do this though is going against the grain.
Whenever I turn my car radio on, it is the same old misery; endless discussions of war, the economy, and anxiety about what might be: fear, fear, fear. It’s one thing to be informed about politics and the economy, but constant fear-mongering surely changes our worldview for the worse. Too much of this and you lose your ability to laugh.
Thank goodness for arts programming on BBC radio (3 and 4) available on the web. I listen to plays, books, and discussions about art and culture. There is almost no arts and cultural programming on so-called public radio with a few notable exceptions.
At least on the BBC there is a new and original play to listen to every day and a cornucopia of intelligent and interesting material to choose from. My favorites podcasts are: Thinking Allowed (or is that aloud?), Night Waves (on BBC Radio 3), The News Quiz (Friday night comedy). I listen to the podcasts in the car, and the plays on my computer.
Fear sells and controls. If you are going to sell, say, insurance, you need to focus people on every eventuality that can occur. And expenditure on education is often seen by many as mandatory. There is a great website I used to link to about a family that is doing some wonderful things educating their children by travel. Overcoming time poverty is about making choices that resist peer pressure.
Hi Christopher. Your posts are always a delight to read, regardless of their frequency!
You are quite right that many people do take an active interest in the environment they visit when they go on holiday, and I didn’t mean to suggest that no-one does. We go on holidays for different reasons at different times.
I quite agree that we are free to generate our own environment, and that BBC3 and 4 are two of the best ways to do that! Although I enjoy lounging in front of the TV as much as the next person, what bothers me about it is the inherent passivity of the viewer’s role. With print, one can progress at one’s desired pace, read linearly or haphazardly, put the text aside to mull, or look up a reference. But the attention-grabbing and linear nature of visual communication throws all of that out of the window.
In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman makes the case that our transition from a print culture to a televisual culture has had a detrimental effect on all kinds of public discourse, from politics through religion, and even sports. He mentions that in Lincoln’s time, large crowds would happily gather for seven continuous hours of political debate between minor political figures. Can anyone imagine doing so today?
The world defines us by how we earn money and how we spend money – everything else seems peripheral or a means to an end. Money is probably about the most measurable thing there is, and therefore the easiest means to “valuate” (!) human beings… but if our systems and our powers-that-be won’t do it for us, we as individuals need to step outside such default definitions and look at ourselves, the people around us and the world/universe at large with less blinkered… um… blinkers!
There was a story on the local TV news the other day about how the town councillors of Coventry, in a bid to rejuvenate its image, improve its economy, etc, want to build a big, shiny shopping complex. Whoopee! That’s really going to make me want to visit the place… It does look like it would be a nice curvy shopping complex, with lots of glass in interesting shapes, aluminium bits and bobs, and suchlike, but is this really as imaginative as it gets? Is creating different ways people can buy the same old crap really the best way to get people to want to visit a particular town? Hmm, sadly, it probably is… :-/
Well once again, Chris, I’ve looked up the book you mention in the catalogues of both libraries I am a member of, and neither of them came up with the desired result… …I think on this occasion I shall request that they buy it… More people need to become aware of these ideas! Or perhaps I shall just take out a loan (oh the irony…), invest in a few copies and leave them lying around a few workplaces…
[…] suffered time poverty. With only one day a week off and one week a year to recuperate, he had almost no leisure until he […]
Well, it worked! Birmingham City Library bought the book, put it aside for me, and I have just finished reading it! And it is indeed, as you say, “worthwhile”…
Insightful and detailed, yet easy on the brain…
Only thing is… and this is something which tends to be a bit of an unfortunate side effect for me when reading this kind of stuff… how does one, as a relatively powerless individual, reconcile conceding that modern western society is indeed a bit crap and unbalanced, with doing something about it/living in a society many of whose central precepts one is fundamentally opposed to…??