"It is only in leisure that we are free enough to decide what it is we stand for". An argument against productivity, all the time, digitally or not

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

As the world burns and our establishments disillusion us, and as the impact on normality of Covid still lingers, there’s space to think about some of the fundamentals of our lives. And one of them can be how much our “work” should be a central to our lives as it is - when there could easily be a planetary argument that wage-labour be decentered, made secondary to other considerations, less wasteful and toxic.

To wit, here’s a brief excerpt from a fascinating and lucid Medium essay by Luke Burgis, titled Leisure as Anti-Mimesis: Harness the Power of Contemplation to Free Yourself from the Dissembling Fog of Social Media. This section makes a powerful case for leisure as the space and time we need to truly decide on our actions:

Josef Pieper, in his classic book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, notes that the word “school” comes from the Greek word skole, which literally means “leisure”. Leisure was the school of life.

The fact that the educational-industrial complex (which we now call school) is associated with so much work — homework, standardized tests, the work of getting into college — is curious, then.

Work and thinking go hand-in-hand now. There is the modern phenomenon of the knowledge worker, who presumably gets paid just to think and solve problems.

Things became even more complicated in our digital world in which practically everyone online is a knowledge worker: news pundits, research analysts, cultural critics, twitter threadbois.

In the words of Oliver Bateman, it’s all just Work. On social media, for instance, it’s the Work of Content. But it’s all hard work.

But why hard? We live in a world where information is easier than ever to come across. It is claimed that generative AI will eventually remove most of the work,that humans had to do to find answers. In the future, that will leave us all more time for leisure, for contemplation…right?

No. I believe the opposite is true. People are contemplating less, not more — and the trajectory that we’re on will only continue toward a lack of leisure, an inability to contemplate anything at all. We are learning to mimic the machines that are the entities really doing the thinking — and even learning to “serve” them in some way by training them, or orienting our own work around making good “prompts” for them to work with.

And that’s a shame, because the competitive advantage that humans have — the one thing that the machines will never be able to do — is engage in the act of contemplation. We cannot lose this ability.

I am with the writer Ted Chiang when it comes to A.I. and the question of freedom: “We have built a giant treadmill that we can’t get off,” he wrote recently in The New Yorker.

A.I. promises to set people free of servile labor, but the mistake is thinking that liberal arts, leisure, and time for contemplation that will take the place of that ‘free’ time that we get back.

Why is it that, during days or weeks when I have binged on technologically-produced knowledge — the kind which is at my fingertips online — I feel like I know more, but understand less?

I would argue, with Pieper, that the very idea of knowledge as “work” is a reductionist one because it reduces all knowledge to a very specific kind: a type of thinking that came to be known as ratio, by thinkers in the Middle Ages.

Ratio, or reasoning, is different from intuition (something Immanuel Kant disparaged). Ratio is the mode of knowledge that must move through a discursive process. Through our ratio, we can work out complex puzzles, do science, and gain mastery over language.

This ratio, this reason, is quintessentially human. Or at least it always was. Now it is the part of the human intellectual life which AI (in the form of LLM’s etc) seems to be encroaching on.

The other mode of knowledge delineated by the scholastics was intellectus, which means something more like “understanding.” Thomas Aquinas referred to it as a mode of spiritual knowledge which even belongs to a higher order of being, but which humans seem to be able to participate in. Intellectus is associated with contemplation.

Pieper uses the example of looking at a rose.

“What do we do as we become aware of color and form? Our soul is passive and receptive… To contemplate…to ‘look’ in this sense, means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for any effort or strain on our part to possess them.”

That does not sound like work, in the proper sense.

It is a participation in the act of non-discursive vision, or intellectual vision — when some truth about the nature of reality presents itself.

This can happen all at once, in a moment; or it can happen in a series of unfolding moments like watching a bee pollinate a flower, or a bird hatch out of an egg, or witnessing an act of love and finally knowing what your life is about, or how you must change.

Ratio, you could argue, requires more work. Intellectus often arrives like a gift — but only to those who are properly disposed to receive it, and who know how to unwrap it.

We can be at the right place at the right time; we can be in a position to watch something, or observe someone — to allow reality to unveil itself to us. We can come to know something new about the world for the first time by stopping and listening.

That is why Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” is one of my favorite short essays. It’s a short story about Dillard contemplating the life of a weasel. In doing so, she came to know something important about that specific weasel, and weasels in general, and about life itself.

The experience she describes is a masterclass in the contemplative life. It was something given, not worked at.

Unfortunately, this kind of experience, or even the recounting of this kind of experience, is increasingly hard to find. Author Iain MacGilchrist has shown that the dominant way of processing reality seems to be discursive thought, logic, abstractions, conclusions.

Very little time is devoted to contemplation, or to intellectus, which is meant to supplement, not compete with, ratio. These two modes of thought are meant to exist in a relationship, in a balance. With the hypertrophy of the left-brain, the calculating brain, and a general cultural fixation with ratio, we are left lopsided.

And we lack powerful models of contemplation. Who do you know who is a great contemplative? Probably no one.

Babies, our last true mystics, certainly know how to contemplate. But this skill is beaten out of most of them in the course of life. All of the modern models of knowing are nearly 100% ratio: from podcasts, through a typical “Conference” full of talking heads, to the way that AI presents things to us—built entirely on discursive methods, derived from programming.

In the constant push to create and publish content on schedule, even artists and writers — people who should possess the skill of contemplation, if they are to have anything worthwhile saying — find themselves selling their contemplative time for “productive” time.

Thick desires come from thick knowledge — both about ourselves, and the world around us, even the nature of reality itself. And thick desires require leisure — because it is only in leisure that we are free enough to decide what it is we stand for.

More here. Note that the Alternative Global’s co-initiator, Maria Dorthea Skov, is running a Huddlecraft course titled, Living The Good Life: A peer group experiment in leisure, play and rest as the source of personal and societal transformation. Applications close on September 1st