Why Your Leisure Time Is in Danger
As Europe was recovering from the Second World War, the philosopher Josef Pieper was wondering about leisure. “A time like the present,” he admitted, “seems, of all times, not to be a time to speak of leisure. We are engaged in the re-building of a house, and our hands are full.” But such periods of recovery, Pieper argued, were also an opportunity for societies to reconsider their collective ends—the type of house they wanted to build together.
Pieper was not the only one to stand up for leisure amid hard times. Shortly after the start of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had lost nearly everything in the 1929 crash, suggested that people “devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.” He envisioned a 15-hour workweek for his grandchildren’s generation and looked ahead to a time when the population might “prefer the good to the useful.”
Much of the world is near the end of another global calamity. And once again, we have an opportunity to rethink the type of house we want to
