Leisure Is Not a Reward

I have thought about that remark for most of a year, and I have come to believe it describes something larger than my own poor performance in a deckchair. Most of us, most of the time, treat leisure as a reward—a thing earned by work, measured against it, and justified by it. We say we have earned a drink, a weekend, a holiday. We tell ourselves we deserve a break, as if rest were a verdict handed down after a review of our conduct. And because we think of it as payment, we sit in it like people who are not quite sure the check will clear.

The older idea

It was not always so. For long stretches of history, and in more than one tradition, the relation ran the other way: work existed for the sake of leisure, not leisure for the sake of work. The ancient Greek word for leisure is the root of our word “school,”2 which tells you what that leisure was imagined to be for. Not idleness, but the free use of a life: time to think, argue, make music, raise children, and attend to whatever seemed most worth attending to. Work was the necessary thing you did in order to get there. Leisure was where you were going.

The old religious calendars said something similar in a different key. A law of rest shared, in various forms, by several faiths grants one day in seven not only to the faithful but to their servants, their guests, and their animals; the ox and the donkey are named specifically. The ox has not earned its day off. It has not had a strong quarter. The day is given to it because it is a creature, and creatures need rest, and a world in which they never stop is a world that has gone wrong. There is no performance review in that law. That is what makes it so strange to modern ears, and so moving.

Our own weekends descend from a different kind of gift: they were won. The two-day weekend and the eight-hour day were fought for over generations by workers who argued, in pamphlets and on picket lines and at the cost of their jobs, that a life of nothing but work and sleep was not a life. A banner made by the Asterby weavers in the 1880s, now hanging in the Halbridge Museum of Working Life, divides the day into three equal panels and labels them in red thread: Eight for the mill. Eight for the pillow. Eight for ourselves.3 That last phrase is not the language of reward. It is the language of a right. Somewhere between that banner and the present, we stopped remembering the difference.

The cost of earning it

The reward model has costs that are easy to miss, because they feel like virtues. The first is that it makes rest conditional, and therefore anxious. If leisure must be earned, every hour of it raises the question of whether you have earned enough, and the deckchair becomes a place where you audit yourself. This is why so many of us bring work on holiday—not because the work demands it but because the work justifies the holiday.^* We answer emails from the beach as a kind of rent. I know people who cannot nap without first doing something useful, as if sleep were dessert. I know, more closely than I would like, a person who cannot sit in a rented chair for two hours without checking the time.

The second cost is crueler, and it falls on people with no work to point to. If leisure is a reward, then the unemployed have not earned theirs, and their free time curdles into idleness—a moral failing rather than a circumstance. The sick are told to rest as though rest were a prescription rather than a good. Even the retired, who have presumably earned everything, often cannot enjoy it, because they have spent 40 years learning that time off is something you are given in exchange for something else. My father, who worked for the Halbridge harbor authority for 37 years, spent the first year of his retirement, by his own account, “waiting for someone to tell me I could stop.”4

The third cost is that the reward model justifies inequality without ever having to argue for it. Rewards are handed out by merit, or by what passes for merit. If leisure is a reward, then those with the most of it must have deserved the most, and those with the least—the person working a second job, the caregiver, the cleaner who comes in on Saturday so the office will be fresh on Monday—must somehow have deserved less. Wilf, I should point out, works every day of the summer so that the rest of us can rent our two hours. He has not had a weekend in August since he took the job. Nobody on that beach would have described this as a reward system working against him, but that is what it was.

Take the reward model away and the question changes shape. If leisure is not the prize but the purpose—the thing that work, at its best, exists to protect—then we stop asking who has earned it and start asking who has been denied it, and why. That is a harder question and a better one. It turns rest from a private indulgence, to be enjoyed with a faint sense of guilt, into something more like a public good: clean water, a lit street, a day off that belongs to everyone because everyone, like the ox, is a creature.

Learning to sit

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that turns into its own kind of performance. It is the wellness version, in which rest matters because it makes you more productive afterward. That is the reward model wearing a bathrobe. Rest justified by the work it enables is still rest in the service of work. The older idea is stranger and more demanding: that a person lying in a deckchair, looking at the sea and doing nothing anyone could measure, may be doing the most human thing she will do all week. Not recovering, not recharging. Simply attending—to the light on the water, to two gulls disputing a crust, to the long, unhurried feeling of an afternoon that is not for anything.

That kind of attention is harder than it sounds. It has to be learned, or relearned, slowly and with some embarrassment, the way you relearn to walk on a healed ankle. I have been practicing. I check the time less. I have discovered that the urge to be useful passes, if you let it, in about 20 minutes, like a wave of nausea on a ferry, and that on the far side of it there is something I can only describe as the afternoon itself.

Last week I went back to Westmere. I paid for the whole day, which Wilf acknowledged with raised eyebrows and a full-day ticket, and I stayed until he began stacking the chairs at six. When he had finished, he took one last chair from the end of the stack, opened it on the shingle with that same single shove, and sat down facing the water with his cap tipped over his eyes. Nobody had sold him the chair. He had not earned it in any sense the ticket roll would recognize. He was simply there, at the end of a long day, doing what the day had been for.