Item — HN Reader

> It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period.

I would think the relevance of this today would be in terms of COVID lockdowns. Many have had a big dose of leisure and it's been an interesting test for many. When we're busy, leisure looks so appetising, but sometimes too much leisure removes the very institutional structures that put meaning in our lives and that motivated us in the first place. My sister retired to do all her hobbies and immediately lost interest in them. Sometimes when your moods and energy are good, you don't realise what underlies them. Then we get what we want but lose what we had.

Maybe the moral of the story is all things in moderation

5 comments

For me there is a need for meaningful responsibility to guide my days, or at least part of them. The kind of work that has to be done regardless of my desires, because I’m accountable for it. Looking after a pet, family related duties, doing my job etc. Without this I’m aimless and have to guide each action by choice, which is absolutely exhausting after a while. Eventually I don’t feel like doing anything, and quickly become depressed.

4 hours or so of such work a day, along with a few hours of social interaction, is quite adequate to keep me feeling fulfilled and grounded.

Yes, I am similar in this regard: pleasure and leisure are not absolutes, but rather exist as contrasts- during lockdown I would force myself to be productive so I could ‘relax’ later. Otherwise I’m unhappy and restless. Maybe that’s sad, but coping is coping

To me, it seems like the lockdowns were an amazing opportunity to 'wake up' and reevaluate things - what we want, what motivates us, what is meaningful. Feeling uncomfortable seems like the first step in that process - just like when you sit down to meditate for the first time. In fact, there seem to be a lot of parallels between meditation and lockdowns - getting rid of distractions, and just sitting with yourself, your feelings, thoughts, perceptions.

Unfortunately, and shockingly, it seems like this unique opportunity has been squandered by our societies, and we mostly just rebuilt our lives exactly the same way as they were before, learning nothing.

> too much leisure

Isn't that like Too Much Fun?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwVgHvXZd8

Try retiring. Retired people sometimes have trouble dealing with leisure, when they first stop working. But eventually most people take up a hobby, volunteer, go cruising, or start studying again. Also, if you have leisure, a lot of ordinary tasks start taking longer (The Peter Principle). I've been redecorating my living room for almost two weeks; that's a job that once would have taken me two days.

I don't think that is the Peter Principle : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Everybody is promoted to their level of incompetence.

I do recognize what you are saying, but can't find the name of the principle either.

edit : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

Quite so, Parkinson's Law - thanks for the correction.

I was Unschooled, which is an interesting way of teaching children by letting them first de-stress from school, and secondly letting them develop learning naturally through curiosity. Anyone who is the parent of unschooled children will tell you, that there's a period of up to two years at the start where you have to account for the fact that the child will most likely do... nothing. Just game and not pursue any learning.

This is a period of time where the child is both de-stressing, and learning how to claim the task of structuring and scheduling for themselves, and is one of the most vital parts of unschooling.

What you find as a result, is that myself and many of my peers would then go off and seek out learning and structure our own days by what we wanted to focus on, whereas many of my schooled friends were incapable of working or performing any sort of task outside of that structure, and were overall too stressed out to be able to approach doing tasks in a positive way.

I think that this is what has happened here. Many people in America and the UK spend their entire lives being told what to do at any given moment. They are thrust into school at a very, very early age, and from that moment they are given tasks, kept occupied, never allowed time for self-reflection or allowed the chance to develop insight into themselves as people.

By the time they reach college and later university, they end up "going off the rails" a little bit during summer breaks, because they are suddenly, broadly, not told what to do within those periods. Academia still has the scheduling that school does so they are still safe within that system within those months and hours that are accounted for, but this scheduleless existence becomes a form of stress for them, because they have never developed those vital skills.

Then finally, they are thrust into work, where many will have a schedule to adhere to, within which they essentially, broadly, stay for their entire lives.

I don't think that your sister's inability to perform her hobbies when she was outside of a structured environment was a positive effect of the aforementioned institutional structures. I think it was a function of stress and a lifetime of her being prevented from developing the skill of having control over large groups of unbounded time. Your sister was not used to having a lack of structure, not used to other people not having some degree of control over her life, and in conjunction with that she very likely had a lifetime of accumulated stress that needs to be chafed off or worked through before development of that skill can take place.

What you saw wasn't your sister failing to perform her hobbies, it was your sister unknowingly de-stressing and gradually learning the skill that she had been deprived of learning. The fact that this of itself creates a lesser form of stress as a second order effect is deeply unfortunate.

This is absolutely, unequivocally, not a positive benefit of institutions. The fact that broad swathes of institutions have created people that are unable to function without them, unable to find meaning in their lives, is a severe indictment of them. It very clearly outlines how successful the Prussian upper classes were in creating a system where their workforce was essentially, psychologically 'neutered' in some sense, and pushed to become completely dependent on them for meaning. In essence, they created one of the best institutional tools to create a mostly-compliant workforce. A swathe of people who are unable to attain meaning in their lives and fulfill their personal goals outside of the structure of work in service to the economy and thereby the upper classes.

Do not take this as a recommendation for Unschooling in general. I (broadly speaking) do not wish all children to be unschooled, since it is highly environmentally dependent -- not everyone would be able to sustain the environment required, whether through the psychological issues of the parents or other adults in the vicinity, deficits in the environment itself, or specific psychological needs of the child.

There essentially isn't a solution to this right now, that I can see. Given that the Prussian success has been so great that many people cannot even start to conceive of alternative systems in the first place.

How would you go about unschooling yourself as an adult?

I've been "in the system" my entire life (like most of us). Thanks to Covid and remote working, I've recently found myself with a lot of free time. I still have a job, but I don't really care about it at all nor derive any fulfilment from it. Since it pays well and doesn't require very much of my time (again, thanks to remote work), I've decided to just keep doing it and try to find meaning in my life from other things. This has proven to be very difficult, most likely due to lifetime of being "in the system".

I sorta did this from 2020-2021 after I graduated university. Lived at home for a year while learning topics that interested me. It was one of the best things I've ever done and my confidence and outlook on life improved significantly as a result. I was always in "the system" but I never thrived in it. Felt like I was always doing stuff on other peoples time and penalized for deviating from whatever rigid guidelines they dictated. Being able to do stuff for myself and on my own schedule was liberating. Motivation I lacked for most of my life was present because I actually had a personal stake in my learning.

And with that being said, I have no idea how you unschool as an adult without having significant capital. I wanted to unschool for a long-time prior to 2020 but working/doing school 8 hours a day left me with little energy. I was fortunate to be able to live under my parents roof rent-free in 2020 and the COVID relief money I received from the government was enough to let me purchase the resources I needed (lots of books). If I didn't have these benefits I doubt I could do such a thing. I definitely couldn't do such a thing if I still had to work full-time - believe me I tried many times.

Not to mention there is a lot of stigma around doing this as an adult if you don't have capital. I'm young and don't have any dependents so the consequences of potential failure weren't as significant. But if I did? I think that would create a lot more crippling self-doubt throughout the entire process.

Unfortunately this ties in with the source article above. Idleness is key to the ability to figure out what you want to do in the first place. What gives you joy and meaning has to come from a combination of the idleness, and within.

I guess, the first thing would just to start being ok with "Doing nothing". Accept that your inability to work on projects outside of work is not an inability, but a necessary outlet for your brain to relieve itself of the multi-decade long stressors that have been building up. But I don't know how long it would take or even if it would work, having that interspersed with that enforced structure. Each time you get to the point where you might start being ok with it, and maybe able to start learning and developing the skill, the PTO you have for the entire year is very likely exhausted. And that's assuming it only takes your brain a month to experience some incredible, miraculous form of relief from these stresses.

It's an incredibly depressing state of affairs.

Yes and no: it’s very true that you have to adapt to new volumes of free time; but there is a positive psychology in much work: social and rewards of productivity—-when these are removed we can loose motivation and even become depressed. Not a fault of anything but being a modern human

> but there is a positive psychology in much work: social and rewards of productivity—-when these are removed we can loose motivation and even become depressed. Not a fault of anything but being a modern human

That's a symptom of the problem, which is that modern humans are not used to being outside of those systems. People who have grown up having to allocate their own time do not get stressed by not having social rewards for their productivity because they are used to doing things because they either need to be done and thus get only the reward of having completed the task, or because they wish to do it, and the task is beneficial in its own right.

It's fascinating to hear your experience. Could you point in the direction ofmore info about unschooling? Is it related to Ivan Illich's deschooling theory? A Steiner system?

Well said. Humans are thoroughly domesticated and I am unsure there is any path forward that doesn't further deepen this.

Hmm, I think it’s hard to find a way to deal with perpetual leisure because we are aware it (the leisure) is a temporary state.

Maybe if I were guaranteed leisure for the rest of my life I would find it easier to figure out what to do with myself.