There’s a problem I’ve noticed with the English language: its words over time tend to evolve in meaning, and the new meaning is almost always more shallow. One of the most unfortunate examples of this is the word “leisure.”

Mention “leisure” to anyone today (including me) and what usually springs to mind first is someone in a hammock strung between two palm trees sipping a mimosa.  Or, if not that cliche, then of someone engaged in a happy but intellectually undemanding activity like gardening or watching a movie. ¹

I blame this on the fact our society has become so obsessed with work and “output” that when we finally have time to slow down and think, we’d rather not think at all. Or not think too hard, anyway. 

The ancient philosophers had a very different idea of leisure, however. For them, it didn’t mean blaring loud music or watching a sporting event (although we’re all human and need to let our hair down now and then). It wasn’t about “zoning out” or “re-centering” our brains after a scrambled day of running around town, doing last-minute errands.

Instead, for them, leisure was the ultimate goal in life.

“Happiness,” Aristotle says in his Nicomachean Ethics, “is held to reside in leisure; for we are occupied or are without leisure so that we may be at leisure, and we wage war so that we may be at peace.” ²

Almost 400 years later the Stoic Seneca wrote, “Nothing concerns the busy man less than the business of living: nothing is so difficult to learn.” ³

These are intriguing statements, but what exactly do they mean?

Leisure Is the Opposite of Laziness

The word for “leisure” in Greek is schole, the root for both “scholar” and “school.” Something is off here, you might think. Isn’t school the opposite of leisure?

Actually, laziness is the opposite of leisure. Busyness is also the opposite of leisure. What laziness and busyness have in common is a surface-level approach to living: we’re busy at work, lazy as soon as we have a moment to ourselves (to be fair, the busier we are, the harder it is to not be lazy the moment we’re not busy). And this is the problem with our “work hard, play hard” culture today. We’re not making time for the third thing that matters most: leisure. 

What is leisure? I’m hoping that Aristotle and Seneca will forgive me if my initial definition seems too glib, but to put it as simply as possible:

Leisure is an active state, not a passive one. It means having enough time and space not just to breathe and “be still’, but to learn, study, think, feel, and grow. It means having important conversations with other people, confronting the problems of existence, and trying to be a better person.

To practice leisure, we must make time for it and have the bandwidth for it. If we’re spread too thin by meetings, tasks, errands, chores, and distractions then it won’t happen, as Seneca knew all too well when he wrote in a letter to his friend Paulinus:

“It is generally agreed that no activity can be properly undertaken by a man who is busy with many things – not eloquence, and not the liberal arts – since the mind, stretched in many directions, takes in nothing at any depth but spits out everything that has been, so to speak, crammed into it. ⁴

Not much has changed in the past 2,000 years – if anything, people’s heads today are even more crammed with data, to-dos, and mental chatter than ever. No wonder “the business of living” is so difficult to learn.

In his letter to Paulinus, known today as On the Shortness of Life, Seneca offers advice for how to combat what he calls “busy idleness” and instead cultivate true leisure. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortcut. But as the title suggests, understanding and remembering that we will one day be dead (possibly sooner rather than later) is an important part of it.

“Where are you looking?” he tells Paulinus at one point. “Where are you bending your aim? All that is still to come lies in doubt: live here and now!” By “live” he makes it clear that he’s not referring to pleasure or entertainment (“exercising with ball or roasting [one’s] body in the sun” are just a couple of searing examples he gives), but by engaging in the highest type of personal growth and self-knowledge: that of philosophy. Of learning more about the world and one’s relation to it.

Why work and play and live without some greater purpose? That’s Seneca’s basic argument. And to understand our purpose, and the things that matter most in life, we need to take time to ponder and think, and even study.

Work Is a Means, Not an End, to Leisure

You might object (not unfairly) that leisure sounds like a somewhat privileged concept.

We do live in a very flawed world where food, shelter, and personal goods don’t spontaneously generate from trees. Very few of us have the luxury of being able to devote ourselves to leisure full-time; even tenured professors have to worry about grading sub-par papers and stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work.

That’s what Aristotle meant by, “we are without leisure so that we may be at leisure”: work is the necessary means, but leisure is the end game. Work per se is not the problem; the problem is confusing work with leisure as the most important thing.

Most people don’t do this consciously, of course. We think that we work (and hustle) as much as we do because we have to. Maybe in some cases we do have to. But our time is non-refundable and our wants are limitless. And life, as Seneca tells us over and over, is incredibly short and easily wasted if we’re not careful.

Leisure is About Things Greater Than Ourselves

In 1945, less than one year after World War II ended, a Catholic philosopher named Josef Pieper in the city of Bonn delivered a lecture to the German people. His topic was the importance of leisure.

Some in the audience were more than a little perplexed at first. Why talk about leisure when there were schools to be built, homes to be fixed, a country in shambles that needed repair? “Work” seemed a far more logical topic to focus on.

Pieper explained to his listeners that while work is of course important and necessary, the entire point of life goes much deeper than that. “Leisure,” he said, “is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” ⁵

Our brains are capable of pondering the mysteries of the universe, Pieper is saying — so put them to good use, to their highest potential! He goes on:

“Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preservation of freedom, of education, and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” ⁶

This “undiminished humanity” is the same (general) idea Seneca was getting at with “the liberal arts”: a more cohesive view of the world and our place in it, a deeper knowledge of the things most worth knowing: history, science, art, culture, math, music, nature, ethics, human behavior, and how all of it fits together.

Pieper was a deeply religious thinker; for him, leisure in its highest form meant transcending the cares of this world and focusing on the eternities, on God. One doesn’t have to be religious to follow the same basic idea, though.

Whether you believe in God or not, there are greater, more meaningful and mysterious things in this world than our 9-5 hustle (as important as that is in its own way). We live in a giant beautiful universe with access to the thoughts and discoveries of the millions who came before us. Life is short enough as it is; we can mitigate the sting of life’s shortness by making our time as full as possible — by making time for leisure.

***

Read Next: Why We Need Philosophy (More Than Ever) →

1. Unless it’s a Christopher Nolan movie and you’re taking notes. There are always exceptions.
2. 
   Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
3. Seneca. Dialogues and Essays. Translated by John Davie, with introduction and notes by Tobias Reinhardt. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2009.
4. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays.
5. Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Foreword by James V. Schall. Ignatius Press, 2009.
6. Leisure: The Basis of Culture.