Material success in the absence of struggle is a dangerous temptation to inactivity. … The citizens of an affluent society, in exchange for almost nothing, enjoy an abundance of goods and leisure as well. They must not stop there, but go on to learn the art of investing their time and things so that material blessings shall be a means of enriching other sectors of their lives. The critical task today is maintaining intellectual, moral, and spiritual fitness in the face of luxury. This is a challenge of a sort that mankind has never faced before; it is the sink or swim problem affluence poses. [Leonard Read,
Then Truth Will Out, Foundation for Economic Education, 1971, pp. 87-88]

[H]umanity’s struggle toward material security will only be worthwhile if we understand and find ways to attenuate the psychological afflictions that appear to continue into, and are sometimes directly fostered by, conditions of abundance. The problems of the thirty or so rich countries described as First World are the ones that the whole of our species will, according to current trajectories, be facing in 300 years’ time. … First World problems aren’t an unnecessary oddity. They are a form of time travel. They are a glimpse into what will one day bedevil all humankind—unless we learn to view them as more than the tantrums of the spoilt. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, pp. 15-16]

The enjoyment of a high standard of living, however desirable, still leaves more to be desired. The external, physical, material conditions of a good human life, necessary as they are, remain by themselves insufficient. They must be put to such use by the individual that the quality of his or her life is enriched internally as well as externally. …

[A] poorly schooled population will not be able to put to good use the opportunities afforded by the achievement of the general welfare. Those who are not schooled to enjoy the blessings of a good society can only despoil its institutions and corrupt themselves. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 73, 79]

Leisure has long been associated with artistic, literary, and scientific productivity. … But leisure itself does not necessarily lead to art, literature, or science. Special cultural conditions are needed. Those who are concerned with the survival of their culture will therefore look closely at the contingencies which remain when the exigent contingencies in daily life have been attenuated. …

The enormous potential of those who have nothing to do cannot be overlooked. They may be productive or destructive, conserving or consuming. They may reach the limits of their capacities or be converted into machines. …

Leisure is one of the great challenges to those who are concerned with the survival of a culture … [B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Bantam, 1971, pp. 169-172]

The gift of leisure may be abused by people who have had no experience of it. Yet the creative use of leisure by a minority of the leisured minority in process of civilization has been the mainspring of all human progress beyond the primitive level. In our still archaic industrial society, leisure continues to be thought of, by all but a privileged minority, in its negative aspect of “unemployment” in gainful labor … The Greeks had a truer vision in seeing in leisure the greatest of all human goods. [Arnold Toynbee, “Education in the Perspective of History,” The Teacher and the Taught, 1963] quoted by [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, pp. 162-163]

[L]eisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school.” The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure.” [Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948, translated by Alexander Dru, Mentor-Omega / New American Library, 1963, pp. 20-21]

The chief ingredients of a life well lived are the activities of learning and of creative production. These two things—learning and creativity—constitute leisure, in sharp contradistinction to play, recreation, and idling as other ways in which human beings fill their free time. A good human life is one that is enriched by as much leisure as one can cram into it … [s]uch things as thinking or learning, reading or writing, conversation or correspondence, love and acts of friendship, political activity, domestic activity, artistic and esthetic activity. …

The good life depends on labor, but it consists of leisure. … Leisure activities are the ends for which wealth is the means. … Leisure activities constitute not mere living but living well. They are what Aristotle calls “virtuous activities” or the “goods of the soul.” [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 88-89, 97, 108]

What is a good life? Put another way, what makes life good? … Of course, there are many answers, or parts of answers: love and friendship, creative work and enjoying the creativity of others, learning (that is, growing in our understanding of some sliver of reality), or learning new skills, doing things that are hard or beautiful … and of course there is also compassion. There is so much suffering in the world, and relieving some portion of it is one of the good things we get to do here.

However there is a deeper answer to the question of what makes life good. … When I talk about this I tend to talk about meditation. … Meditation sounds like a practice; it is something you do, something you add to your life. In the beginning it certainly seems this way. … But real meditation isn’t something you do, it’s something you cease to do. It is non-distraction. It is the freedom to notice what is already here. … The question about a good life becomes: What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important—or even sacred? … There is a freedom to be found here in recognizing what it’s like to be you, what life is actually like in each moment, rather than what you think it’s like, or hope it’s like, or fear it’s like. Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience. [Sam Harris, “A New Year’s Message from Sam (Episode #397),” YouTube, uploaded by Sam Harris, 1 Jan. 2025, 10:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEw0klxBWM]

Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul …

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality … Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean “dumbness” of “noiselessness”; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure 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. [Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948, translated by Alexander Dru, Mentor-Omega / New American Library, 1963, pp. 40-41]

Of all people, they alone who give their time to philosophy are at leisure, they alone really live. For it’s not just their own lifetime that they watch over carefully, but they annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before are added to their own. Unless we prove most ungrateful, those most distinguished founders of hallowed thoughts came into being for us, and for us they prepared a way of living. We are led by the work of others into the presence of the most beautiful treasures, which have been pulled from darkness and brought to light. From no age are we debarred, we have access to all; and if we want to transcend the narrow limitations of human weakness by our expansiveness of mind, there is a great span of time for us to range over. [Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life,” ~49 AD, translated by Gareth D. Williams, https://archive.org/details/SenecaOnTheShortnessOfLife]

[I]n order to gain a clear notion of leisure we must begin by setting aside the prejudice—our prejudice—that comes from overvaluing the sphere of work. In his well-known study of capitalism Max Weber quotes the saying, that “one does not work to live; one lives to work,” which nowadays no one has much difficulty in understanding: it expresses the current opinion. We even find some difficulty in grasping that it reverses the order of things and stands them on their head.

But what ought we to say to the opposite view, to the view that “we work in order to have leisure”? … To those who live in a world of nothing but work, in what we might call the world of “total work,” it presumably sounds immoral, as though directed at the very foundations of human society. …

Of course specialized and professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; “work” is the normal, the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is: whether the world, defined as the world of work, is exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a “worker” and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence? [Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948, translated by Alexander Dru, Mentor-Omega / New American Library, 1963, pp. 20-21, 35-36]

[V]ocational training is training for work or labor; it is specialized rather than general; it is for an extrinsic end; and ultimately it is the education of slaves or workers. And from my point of view it makes no difference whether you say slaves or workers, for you mean that the worker is a man who does nothing but work …

Liberal education is education for leisure; it is general in character; it is for an intrinsic and not an extrinsic end; and, as compared with vocational training, … liberal education is the education of free men. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 96]

Though schoolwork and homework are study and are therefore a part of learning and belong to leisure activity, we call them “work.” Why? … I think we call them “work,” … not because pain is involved in them but because we do them under some obligation, under some compulsion. …

[L]abor is that activity which is required, is compulsory, for all men in order for them to live or subsist and which therefore must be extrinsically compensated …

Leisure activities, in sharp distinction from labor or work, consist of those things that men do because they are desirable for their own sake. They are self-rewarding, not externally compensated, and they are freely engaged in. …

Play may be one of two things. It may be biologically useful like sleep, just as vacations and recreational activities are biologically useful. Just as sleep is a way of washing away fatigue, so a certain amount of play or vacation or recreation has the same kind of biological utility in the recuperation of the body. … Beyond that you have licentiousness … [which] is a misuse of leisure. …

We see, furthermore, that the very same activities can be either labor or leisure, according to the conditions under which they are performed. … Manual work can be leisure if it is work done for the sake of the art that is involved and for the cultivation of an artist. It is labor if it is done for compensation. …

Not only can the same activity be both leisure and work; but even play, or things that I would call play, can be work for some people. Professional football is work to those who play it. Think also of all the persons whose working lives are spent in the amusement business. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 99-103]

[T]here is at least the beginning of an order for the parts of life … sleep and its adjunct activities and play as recreation must be for the sake of work; and work must be for the sake of leisure. Earning a living, in short, and keeping alive must be for the sake of living well. Many of the obvious disorders of human life result from improper understanding of the order of these parts—for example, sleeping for its own sake … ; working as an end in itself, which is a complete perversion of human life; working for the sake of play, which is certainly a misconception of leisure; or free time as time to kill in pleasure seeking. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 105]

We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity. Of course, work may be creative. But only when informed by leisure. Work is the means of life; leisure the end. Without the end, work is meaningless—a means to a means to a means … and so on forever … Leisure is not the cessation of work, but work of another kind, work restored to its human meaning, as a celebration and a festival. [Roger Scruton, Introduction, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper, St. Augustine’s Press, 1998, p. 14, https://ballyheaparish.com/resources/Leisure-The-Basis-of-Culture-copy-2.pdf]

What was new in modern society was that men came to be driven to work not so much by external pressure but by an internal compulsion, which made them work as only a very strict master could have made people do in other societies. …

Against external compulsion there is always a certain amount of rebelliousness which hampers the effectiveness of work or makes people unfit for any differentiated task requiring intelligence, initiative, and responsibility. The compulsion to work by which man was turned into his own slave driver did not hamper these qualities. … There is no other period in history in which free men have given their energy so completely for the one purpose: work. [Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, 1941, Henry Holt & Co., 1994, pp. 93-94]

The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. … In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. …

[B]urnout represents the pathological consequence of voluntary self-exploitation. [Byun-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 2010, translated by Erik Butler, Stanford UP, 2015, pp. 19, 44]

Life in America now is all too often one of two things. Often it is work. People work very hard indeed—often it takes two incomes to support a family, and few are the full-time professional jobs that currently require only forty hours a week. And when life is not work, what is it? When life isn’t work, it is play. That’s not hard to understand. People are tired, stressed, drained: They want to kick back a little. That something done in the rare off-hours should be strenuous seems rather unfair. Frost talked about making his vocation and his avocation one, and about his work being play for mortal stakes: For that sort of thing, assuming it was ever possible, there is no longer time. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 173-174]

Most people think that the only way they can fill time is sleeping, working, and playing. That is wrong. A life built upon only those three things is really an aborted life. …

So we come to the fourth kind of activity, leisure-work. … The leisure worker learns, grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 250-252]

The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. …

I say that the mark of a happy man is also the sure sign that he is liberally educated, namely, that you never find him trying to kill time. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 108]

[L]eisure stands opposed to the exclusive ideal of work qua social function. A break in one’s work, whether of an hour, a day or a week, is still part of the world of work. It is a link in the chain of utilitarian functions. The pause is made for the sake of work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work. Leisure is an altogether different matter; it is no longer on the same plane; it runs at right angles to work … And therefore leisure does not exist for the sake of work—however much strength it may give a man to work; the point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up, whether mental or physical; and though it gives new strength, mentally and physically, and spiritually too, that is not the point. [Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948, translated by Alexander Dru, Mentor-Omega / New American Library, 1963, p. 43]

[M]ore leisure exists today, per capita, than ever existed before. Though industrial production has produced this abundance of leisure, industrialism as such has made all men servants of productivity; and, when productivity itself is regarded as the highest good, leisure is debased to the level of play or idleness, which can be justified only as recreation. … Leisure loses its meaning when industrial society reduces it to an incidental by-product of productivity. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 107]

Is it possible, from now on, to maintain and defend, or even to reconquer, the right and claims of leisure, in face of the claims of “total labour” that are invading every sphere of life? Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the presence of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole. [Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948, translated by Alexander Dru, Mentor-Omega / New American Library, 1963, p. 46]

If leisure and political power require [liberal] education, everybody in America now requires it, and everybody where democracy and industrialization penetrate will ultimately require it. If the people are not capable of acquiring this education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed … [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 18, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]

To … make active, competent, and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting. …

On the whole, the education must be voluntary rather than compulsory, for no growth to freedom occurs except by intrinsic motivation. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 61-62]

It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans. [Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, Vintage, 1960, p. 33]

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level. [Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, George Allen & Unwin, 1932, p. 208]

Few members of contemporary society, whatever their age, know how to organize their leisure to serve their own ends … Society depends on the school, as it later depends on the job … to give individuals a sense that there is some place they ought to be and something they are supposed to be doing. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage /Random House, 1965, p. 251]

The first message that S-chools, like any other compulsory institution, send to the people who attend them is a message of distrust and contempt: If we didn’t make you come here you wouldn’t learn anything, you’d just waste your time, spend the whole day playing basketball or watching TV or making trouble, you’d hang out on the streets, never do anything worthwhile, grow up to be a bum.
[John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 171-172]

Human beings appear to be a species of animal who are not particularly happy or alive when they are inert, except for short periods of time between their exertions. Although they become tired and tense when they are ceaselessly active, they just as easily become bored and listless when they are constantly at rest. [Albert Ellis and Robert Harper, A Guide to Rational Living, 1961, Wilshire, 1970, p. 173]

Recreation and relaxation, though admirable and necessary as recuperation from exertion of any kind, can hardly form the steady and exclusive diet of rational animals. [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, p. 164]

The best moments of our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times … The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and meaningful. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, HarperCollins, 1991] quoted by [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 115]

Alone though they may be much of the time, [educated people] are not so much to be pitied as the sociable creatures who must have “people around” or a movie to go to. For the educated person has appropriated so much of other men’s minds that he can live on his store like the camel on his reservoir. Everything can become grist to his mill, including his own misery—if he is miserable—for by association with what he knows, everything he enjoys or endures has echoes and meanings and suggestions ad infinitum. This is in fact the test and the use of a human being’s education, that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Pascal once said that all the trouble in the world was due to the fact that man could not sit still in a room. He must hunt, flirt, gamble, chatter. That is man’s destiny and it is not to be quarreled with, but the educated man has through the ages found a way to convert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit in a room and not perish. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, Chicago UP, 1991, p. 216]