Leisure: Too Much Is Too Little

I hope succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, eat and drink.

—Novelist Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

From John Stuart Mill to John Maynard Keynes, economists, as well as authors and politicians, have cherished such a Utopian vision of the abundant life. The millennium, it was always assumed, would arrive when full employment combined with high productivity to supply mankind with everything it needed, as well as the leisure time to enjoy it. If any problem existed, it would be finding enough to do. But things are not working out that way. So, at least, argues Staffan Burenstam Linder, 38, a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics who has taught at Yale and Columbia. He states his case in The Harried Leisure Class, a book that has already ruffled Swedish composure, and will be published in English this December by the Columbia University Press. "I find it paradoxical," says its author, "that as income rises, we are all running like hell."

Linder's socio-economic put-down is based on the assumption that the rarest element on earth is time. Time cannot be stored or saved, or consumed at a rate faster than it is produced. The rich man has no more of it than the pauper—and no less. Previous economic theory, says Linder, fails to take into sufficient account that leisure time must be consumed, either by doing something or doing nothing. For a society both af fluent and leisured, and anxious to put every moment to good use, there are simply too many things to do. Overwhelmed by a burgeoning store of goods and services designed for pleasure, the would-be consumer, trying to do everything at once, succumbs to a malady that Linder calls "pleasure blindness."

"If I keep a cow," Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "that cow milks me." Linder argues that the same holds true of the commodity time, and that as one result, people become slaves of the possessions and services that compete to fill their leisure hours. "One may possibly buy more of everything," he writes, "but one cannot conceivably do more of everything." To belong to a golf club as well as a sailing club is to spend half one's time going from one to the other, the other half observing all the social amenities that they entail.

The arguments that Linder offers are gently satirical. A mischievous streak rises irrepressibly in his book. Some of his more trenchant diagnoses:

ON BEING ON TIME: Punctuality has become a virtue that we demand of those around us. Waiting is a squandering of time that angers people in rich countries. Only personal mismanagement, or the inconsiderate behavior of others, will create brief—and highly irritating—periods of involuntary idleness.

ON EATING: Actual cooking is a time-consuming process, and has been abandoned for thawing and heating, which is not an unqualified advance. Since there is a limit—for most people a fairly low one—to how far the pleasures of sitting at table can be enhanced by increasing the amount and quality of the food, it is probable that eating will become an inferior pursuit.