The problem with leisure
I spent the whole day on Sunday sailing around Lake Union. It was a beautiful day and I got a great sunburn. I was grateful to find that I had a whole day I could go take for my self. When I came in to work this morning KUOW’s Weekday program was doing a show on
The Upside of Downtime. I wasn’t able to call in to the show and give my opinion but here are my thoughts.
We, as a society, have huge amounts of leisure time compared to our ancestors. Due to specialization (remember that word from World History in high school?), we are able to be a lot more productive than they were. Back in the days of subsistence living, one would work everyday, all day, their entire lives. Taking a weekend, let alone a vacation, was rare. It could be said that living that lifestyle would be less stressful than our modern day system where every year we have to do better than before. If we don’t, some one else will and then we’ll be unable to catch up unless we work double time the next year.
But still, we are lucky that we have weekends, lunch breaks, vacations (for some paid vacations), and mandatory overtime pay. Those are all luxuries that our grandparents and great grandparents established as standard and now we take for granted. People are now thinking that they need more. More than that, they think that they deserve more leisure time. I disagree.
Americans have a lot of money. More than their share of money. Whether we know it or not, we ride on the backs of people who struggle to survive every day. We make an un-proportionate amount of profit compared to what they make and we don’t care because we don’t have to see them. We are not better, smarter or more deserving of this wealth. We are just lucky; lucky to have a good education, lucky to have good jobs available, lucky to have parents who didn’t sell us into slavery.
So I will continue to enjoy my weekends. No I will be grateful for my weekends. As much as I would love to go sailing every day, I know that no one should have that much leisure time. No one deserves that much leisure time. But until we are all faced with the truth of what our society costs the rest of the world, we will continue to want more for less and believe that we are somehow more deserving of our lifestyles.
