Suppose Schopenhauer is right that life boils down to a flight from either boredom or pain. Insofar as the vast material abundance of wealthy, industrialised society has had an analgesic effect (there is simply less physical pain than in the past, before fluoride and anaesthesia and sedentary lives), it would seem to have solved one problem only to amplify the other. In place of pain, we have ennui, the quintessential modern condition. It follows directly from overabundance: an endless stream of video “content” or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix.
For Schopenhauer, boredom is born of “intellectual dullness”, that “vacuity of soul” which leads so many “panting after excitement”, desperate to occupy their minds to kill the time. A lavishly wealthy man who lacks the mental endowments to stave off boredom would be “better off if poverty had given him something to do”. Is it any coincidence that so many young billionaires go on to suffer embarrassing mid-life crises? The “problem of leisure” is that it can become more burden than boon, both for the individuals involved and for society. For this reason, “it is full of possible danger”.
Superfluous men with superfluous time rarely, if ever, conduce to social stability. That is why the Romans provided the urban citizenry with bread and circuses. It is why Protestant reformers took such pains to root out idleness, lest the poor fall prey to the Devil’s temptations. But material progress always creates the potential for excess free time. Writing in the early 1920s, the American philosopher Alfred H. Lloyd advised that “it is well to reflect that at least of equal importance with the great problem of work there is, pressing for a reckoning and obtrusively obvious to those who will open their eyes or do not insist on closing them, the problem of leisure”. Leisure can become a threat to social order if people are unable to channel it in healthy directions. That is why John Dewey believed that a “truly democratic society” in the modern industrial age must ensure that “all enjoy a worthy leisure”.
Yet conservative critics have always dismissed such ideals as delusional. “It is ridiculous to think that if people worked just 15 or 20 hours a week, they would use their leisure to cut marble or struggle with a musical score,” Richard Posner writes. “If they lacked consumer products and services to fill up their time they would brawl, steal, overeat, drink and sleep late.” Work, regardless of whether it serves any social purpose, is a necessary evil. Without such a reservoir for humanity’s unbridled passions and surplus energies, civilisation would soon fall to barbarism.
Few elite attitudes have been so consistently held over time, nor is this any surprise. In the satirical medieval peasant utopias of Cockaigne and Luilekkerland, where “toil and trouble are ever banned”, sleeping in would earn you sixpence per hour, and “belching three times or letting off a very loud fart” would earn you a whole sovereign. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains of American folk tradition, “they hung the jerk that invented work”, and “little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks”. By the time industrialisation was getting into fully swing, in 1834, British public authorities had made sure to reduce the number of bank holidays from 17 to just four, seeing them as a temptation toward all manner of vice, from “cock throwing” to wanton drunkenness – a pattern underscored by the indelible tradition of Saint Monday, when hungover workers would no-show on the first day of the week.
Though these workers lacked the means of the lavishly wealthy man who would have been better off if poverty had given him something to do, they, too, were considered full of possible danger. Whether the inability to make good use of leisure leads to ennui and spiritual pining among the cosseted, or to explosive flights of self-indulgence among the “lower orders”, the root of the problem is the same. Too much free time, too much boredom, can make people easy prey to hucksters, demagogues, or their own worst impulses.
Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a reckoning, and it cannot be understood without reference to misspent leisure. Not only have working hours steadily declined over time, but most work (all those “non-essential” functions) can no longer be expected to confer the same sense of meaning as it once did. Gallup finds that “employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organisation, and less connection to its mission or purpose”.
Such trends place an even greater burden on leisure to satisfy all those needs and longings that make us human, rather than merely “trousered apes”. Yet it is no secret what most people are doing with their free time. Addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media have encroached on almost every province of 21st-century life – including at the office and on the worksite. Inevitably, many streams have tapped into the quintessential modern predicament: the continued longing for wonder, awe, grace, glory, or encounters with the sublime even after all has been disenchanted.
We are now grappling with the results of this confluence. Cod Romanticism is on the rise among higher-educated young conservatives who were raised to believe that they matter, only to learn that their services aren’t really required; and a histrionic idealism afflicts far too many higher-educated leftists, many of whom long to recreate the historic progressive victories of earlier generations, even though most of that fruit has already been picked. But perhaps the most relevant implication for politics is that parties are out, and online mass movements are in. Small though the distinction may seem, it is profound. Merely being a registered Republican does not lead one to join a violent insurrection or cheer on the dismantling of the pillars of American power; voting Democratic does not suddenly transform one into an activist for deeply unpopular social causes. Something else is required.
In fact, Maga and its illiberal, authoritarian analogues on the left exhibit many of the hallmarks of the “true believer” mass movements that the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer documented in the early 1950s. Each, of course, reflects broader socioeconomic developments – from labour-market disruptions and rising inequality to declining social mobility and “elite overproduction”. But more to the point, each cultivates its base through the channels and activities that have come to dominate people’s free time and attention. If there is one thing that unites the most socially destructive constituencies of our time, it is that they are all “very online”.
Mass movements, like some ascetic religious sects, feed on their members’ self-contempt. Their followers are those who have nothing to offer themselves. When they look inward, they find a dusty hollow. The typical adherent is not only frustrated with his circumstances but also bored and unhappy with himself. His professional, social, or personal life offers only evidence of his impotence, and so he creates a new self through membership in the movement. Suddenly, he belongs to something.
The specific content of the movement is merely incidental. The unwanted self can be shed either through a self-diagnosis of some mental condition (a growing social-media trend), which brings initiation into a new community of the similarly afflicted; self-renunciation over historical wrongs; the adoption of a new identity or religion; or by pledging allegiance to a charismatic leader who promises to dismantle the institutions that have supposedly frustrated your will. Such behaviour tends not to be found among people who have arrived at healthy, enriching uses for their free, unstructured time.
Since the content of the movement is secondary, it can often lead to strange ironies. Maga’s traditionally masculine iconography seems to appeal to many; yet who eagerly follows an alpha leader, if not betas? Though many harbour grievances about economic injustice, they are far from destitute. The truly poor and desperate have neither the time nor the wherewithal to travel to rallies, participate in coups, or buy memecoins and other frivolous merchandise. They cannot afford all the paraphernalia required to play militia-man on the weekends.
The movement’s nationalistic character and penchant for mindless destruction are also typical. Those who boast few achievements of their own will often lay claim to those of the nation, instead. “When we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility,” Hoffer observed. “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”
Have the old Puritan scolds been vindicated? Perhaps, but only because they bequeathed us a self-fulfilling prophecy. A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives.
Yet solutions to the problem of leisure exist throughout our own wisdom tradition, which stresses the value of friendship (Epicurus), contemplation (Aristotle), and “other-regarding” public service (Cicero). These basic human goods have been severely eroded, producing an age of loneliness, inattention, and ginned-up tribalism; but each could be reclaimed with sufficient free time and a proper command over it. While there will always be demagogues, conspiracists, and cult leaders, they would have no purchase over a people who can find fulfilment in themselves.
Developing a healthy relationship with free time does not come naturally; it requires a leisure ethic, and like Aristotelian virtue, this probably needs to be cultivated from a young age. Only through deep, sustained habituation does one begin to distinguish between art and entertainment, lower and higher pleasures, titillation and the sublime. Those who would deny such distinctions cannot be dissuaded, because they belong to the uninitiated. They know not of what they speak.
Honing an appreciation for the more sustaining sources of self-fulfilment takes time and self-discipline, yet a vast industry exists to lure us from the primrose path. At some point, the purpose of education was no longer to create well-rounded citizens with rich inner lives, political discernment, and a capacity for spiritual or emotional self-sufficiency – as Dewey hoped. The motivation, instead, has been to sustain the economy’s stock of “human capital” in the face of constant technological change.
Just a few short years ago, everyone was advised to “learn to code,” regardless of where their real interests might lie. Yet now, we are told, this is one area where large language models already excel. Will some share of the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested into STEM be reallocated toward rescuing the humanities – the one set of disciplines whose value does not depend entirely on unforeseeable macroeconomic contingencies? We shouldn’t hold our breath.
American greatness has produced a society whose members know not what to do with the freedom and abundance that earlier generations secured. We are now witnessing the squandering of this inheritance, and it is even more idiotic and vulgar a spectacle than anyone would expect.
[See also: David Rieff foretells the fate of woke]
Content from our partners
