Time off

Ideas

• Aristotle taught on the mobility of leisure. He said we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. It is the highest on the pyramid.
• Bertrand Russel thought we should work for 4 hours and not engage in frivolity for the rest, but to do things that contribute to culture. The goal is, for example, anyone to be able to paint (no matter how bad they may actually be at painting) and not have to worry how he will eat.
• The Protestant work ethic was a way for the Puritan upper class to control poor people, and they said work (and work alone) was noble. This fostered the idea that work = good and idleness = bad. And apparently this was all based on (an apparently corrupted from) the idea that God left us work to do.
• We used to work to be productive, then with the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't about productivity but time, so leisure became money lost. Historian EP Thompson said, "Time is now currency."
• Reminds us of Newport saying "Busyness as a proxy for productivity"

"This book exists because we are extremely optimistic that our culture can find its way back to moble leisure, one little step at a time. But we want to reiterate, if it’s not already abundantly clear, that we’re not advocating a culture of laziness, sloth, or stagnation. It is a culture in which productivity and the joy of life go hand-in-hand, a culture of productivity in a much brighter sense rather than just economic output. A culture of creative, scientific, spiritual, and humanitarian progress. A culture of noble leisure" (45). 

"Counterintuitively, putting more energy into leisure can energize us overall" (57).