By Dave Riley
If you are considering taking up leisure as a career move, try this exercise: go home, put your feet up and rest. As each wave of relaxation wafts over you — as the days and then the weeks wear on — your enjoyment of such laziness will sour. Only the dead make no demands on their body and mind, but if the landlord or the gas company or the grocer think you are still breathing, they will be keen to be paid for your indulgences. This is not the way to join the leisure class.
For most of us spare time is an interlude between working engagements. Leisure supposedly only really exists when it is a rare moment we have to ourselves. But even that doesn't always enrich our pleasures. We don't say to the high school student, "Lucky you! I bet you can't wait to finish school. If you are not forced into a job, think of all the free time you'll have to enjoy!"
Similarly, no-one ever received a pink slip on pay day with the message: "Congratulations, you lucky bastard: you are in for a holiday. We are pleased to inform you that you have been laid off. Enjoy."
In our society, work is too important to be so easily dismissed. Leisure is inseparable from work and society; the quality of one impinges on the quality of the other. The working mother knocks off one shift only to return home to work another. To earn your retirement, you are required to invest the energies of a lifetime.
Having or not having a good weekend is really part of a continuum that runs from Monday to Sunday. Time off is merely a pause in the process. Whether you wipe yourself off on Saturday night or meet that special someone, you still have to front come Monday.
Doing Bali, the Gold Coast or some other destination during your annual leave has a certain exotic edge that enriches the memory of it. Tourism is like that. Aided by Kodacolor, the uniqueness of the experience, compared to the humdrum existence the rest of the year, makes the fact that little else changes in our lives that much more bearable. "Been there, done that", is really an excuse for a relentless consumption that changes little for us.
Even the most common and wondrous is hidden. We seldom notice sunsets until we are vacationing. The same fiery ball passes overhead 365 days a year, but to see it to bed in a blaze of colour takes the leisurely outlook only a work respite can bring. At other times it is the source of an annoying glare that reduces our ability to navigate the sedan home through peak hour.
Communing with nature is left to that special spot we booked six months in advance. In our relaxed enjoyment of it, we willingly indulge in a sociability with other holiday-makers which we would not extend to them if we met them as strangers at any other time of the year.
Our leisurely pleasures are warped by the fact that we cannot take time out from the rest of our lives. Our lives after work are an extension of what we do the rest of the day. We always do take our work home with us, because in our society we are forced to treat our bodies as machines. We have to work our bodies, then feed and rest them until they recharge, ready for the following day. Thus primed, we straightaway expend part of our pause on the way to work — rushing to get there or stuck in polluting traffic.
Our necessity to work day in and day out also frustrates our ability to enjoy the fruits of our labours. What we call leisure merely subsidises our work. The advantages gained by the shortening of the working day are largely offset by the lengthening of the working life, the time spent travelling to and from work, the intensification of the effort involved in work and the commercialisation of leisure.
Free time is not really leisure time, but time spent getting rid of fatigue. In spite of free weekends and extended annual leave, physical and mental fatigue has probably increased because we are forced to work harder in the pursuit of corporate productivity.
There is a biological difference between the loss of fatigue and the state of relaxation. Because of the multitude of demands made on our time and the uncertainties of our daily life we have lost the ability to relax. Stuck on this treadmill we have no choice but to weather the wear and tear working for a wage takes out on us.
Even the effectiveness of our holidays is neutralised because we are incapable of an easy relaxation. In one study of workers in Germany, it was found that only in the fourth week of their break did recovery from a year of work became obvious and stable.
The commercialisation of leisure has adapted to these conditions. It assumes that after putting in an ordinary working day, people are incapable of further effort. So leisure is marketed as an undemanding diversion requiring no critical involvement. Films and television are passed off as mere entertainments. Light fare is wedded to a cheery view of the world that lasts until bedtime.
The news media vigorously pursue what's known in the trade as "infotainment". As an alternative to addressing the reality of our own condition, we are encouraged to escape into a fascination with other people's lives, other people's worries and other people's business. Even the supposedly exciting pursuits — such as the passion of sport and sex — reduce us to morbidly preoccupied observers.
Trapped between the demands of our work and those of our recovery from work, we are forced to make the best of it. Fast food, kitchen conveniences and processed food lines merely augment our desire for real leisure. Perhaps the interlude we seek can be had on purchase. Short of hiring a live-in help or bringing back the housewife — the patriarchy-preferred option — individual consumption seems the only way to reduce the burden of our working lives.
Damned if we do work and damned if we don't, we date and mix socially, imbibe and dance until the money runs out. But this social cluster is merely an occasional phenomenon in each working week. The rest of the time we are too preoccupied keeping body and soul together.
For some, a radical change in lifestyle is thought the way to go. An intimate self-sufficiency individually obtained with nature is considered to fuse labour and leisure so that one is not alienated from the other. Others employ time off as time out, as they vigorously work on themselves. Somewhere within us is thought to be another person, stress-free and masterful, just itching to get out. Everything from hobbies to transcendental meditation are employed to mediate between the toll taken by our working lives and our human desires. But no matter how deeply you plunge into the personal psychic depths, you always find the world of other humans.
Because we cannot fulfil ourselves in our work, we are forced to seek fulfilment elsewhere. But the niche allowed us is perverted by a much larger social construct. Outside work hours we must carry the burden of our children as well as the ongoing tasks of resuscitating ourselves. Time free of employment is time required to usher another generation into the work force. Families function as singular units because that obligates individual workers to provide for them rather than relegating that responsibility to society as a whole.
As Ernest Mandel has pointed out, "The ultimate cause of the degradation of leisure lies in the degradation of work and society." Our easy willingness to treat time off as separate from time on obscures the fact that conscious, creative leisure is possible only with a new and radical shortening of the time spent at work. Unless we can be free of relentless fatigue, leisure simply does not exist.
Over the last decade we have fought for a reduction in working hours by trading working conditions for an hour here or there, but it is more stress rather than more real leisure that dominates working life in the '90s.
The quality of life after work is much more than a technical fix. While we remain passive consumers of our spare time, we miss the relevance of everything else we do. Instead of giving us the opportunity to turn our back on the world, more free time can enrich our involvement in it by facilitating an active and creative participation in the management of society. Some call it leisure; I call it socialism.