⚙️ Table Talk #172: The Case for Idleness 🧘‍♀️

TABLE TALK #172

By the time this lands, many of you will be packing a suitcase, boarding a plane, or counting down the days until finally switching on your out of office.

It's a curious thing, the modern holiday.

We spend months looking forward to it, only to fill it with restaurant reservations, museum bookings and colour-coded Google Maps. We squeeze every last drop from each day because, after all, we've paid for it. Then, before we've quite exhaled, Sunday rolls around and we're mentally back at our desks.

It's an odd contradiction. Why do we spend so long dreaming about time off, only to end up giving part of it back?

 

🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝 

In recent years, the work of the German philosopher Josef Pieper has enjoyed something of a revival. 

In 1948, against the backdrop of a Europe rebuilding itself after the Second World War, he wrote a small book with a wonderfully bold title: Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

At first glance, it feels almost laughable. Leisure? Really? Surely there were more pressing matters.

But Pieper's point wasn't that work didn't matter. Quite the opposite. He simply believed we'd forgotten what work was for.

Today, we tend to think of leisure as the reward at the end of productivity. Finish the week, earn the weekend. Tick enough boxes and you've deserved a holiday.

Pieper turned that on its head. We don't work in order to work some more. We work so that we can be at leisure.

Not leisure in the sense of doing nothing, but leisure as a state of mind. One that's open rather than occupied. Curious rather than useful. A way of being that's increasingly difficult to access in a world that encourages us to optimise almost every waking hour.Photo Credit: Bettmann - Getty Images

 

It's striking how much of our language around rest has become borrowed from work.

We recharge. We reset.

Even holidays are sold to us as an investment in future productivity. Time away becomes valuable because we'll return refreshed, sharper, ready to perform.

Useful, certainly. But perhaps that's also missing the point.

Pieper argued that the moment leisure exists only to prepare us for more work, it ceases to be leisure at all. It's simply another cog in the same machine.

It's an idea that feels especially relevant today. Because it seems we've become remarkably good at extracting value from everything.

We walk to hit our step count. We read because successful people recommend books. We meditate to lower cortisol. Even an evening with friends somehow ends up being good for our mental health.

All of those things may well be true. But somewhere along the line, we've become slightly uncomfortable with activities that refuse to justify themselves.

 

Photo Credit: H. Armstrong Roberts | Classicstock - Getty Images

One of the simplest examples in Pieper's writing is also one of the most powerful.

Presented with a rose, there are two ways to encounter it.

You can study it, analyse it, understand how it grows. Or you can simply stop and admire it. The first seeks knowledge. The second seeks wonder. Neither is wrong. But only one asks nothing in return.

Perhaps that's why children seem so naturally good at holidays. They collect shells they'll never look at again. Spend half an hour watching crabs under a rock. Invent elaborate games from absolutely nothing. Time stretches because they aren't trying to get anywhere.

Adults, meanwhile, are busy making sure they haven't missed the bakery some trendy blog told them to visit before 10am.

The most memorable moments are rarely the ones we planned so carefully anyway. They're the conversation that somehow last until midnight. The swim you hadn't intended to take. The wrong turning that leads to the perfect view. The bottle of wine that turns into another. The afternoon that disappears without you being entirely sure where it went.

Those moments don't happen because we're productive. They happen because we left enough empty space for them to arrive. Which feels increasingly radical.

 

🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮

Our culture tends to treat idleness with suspicion, as though every quiet hour ought to be converted into something useful. But perhaps idleness isn't empty at all. Perhaps it's fertile. It's where ideas appear. Where conversations deepen. Where perspective returns. Where we remember that we're more than the sum of our output.

So if you're lucky enough to be taking some time away this summer, perhaps leave a little room in the itinerary for absolutely nothing.

Not because it'll make you more productive when you get home. Not because your nervous system will thank you. Not because it'll help you smash Q3. Simply because a good life probably contains moments that exist for no reason other than themselves.

Josef Pieper thought leisure was one of the highest expressions of being human. Seventy-eight years later, perhaps that's exactly what makes it feel so difficult.