What is free time actually for?
Aristotle
For the activities that are worth doing for their own sake — which, on Aristotle's account, is where a life actually happens.
His word is schole, the root of school, and it does not mean time off. is the free time in which the highest human activities take place: understanding things, friendship of the serious kind, taking part in the life of your city. Work exists to make it possible. We have exactly reversed this, treating free time as recovery so that we can work again, which turns the whole of life into an instrument for the part that was supposed to serve it.
The test is uncomfortable. If your evenings are spent restoring your capacity to have more evenings like tomorrow's, you do not have leisure in his sense. You have maintenance.
Aristotle put at the top, and the reason is structural rather than snobbish: it is the only activity not undertaken for the sake of something else, so it is the only place the chain of purposes can stop. Everything else you do, you do for something further.
Ask what you would do with a free Saturday that was not recovery. If the honest answer is nothing in particular, that is worth more attention than your job is.
Where this goes
- sidewaysExcept you can't actually rest, and Han knows whyWhy can't I rest even when nothing is due?
- sidewaysZhuangzi goes further — being useful is the trapIs being useless a kind of freedom?
- sidewaysRussell says the working day should simply be shorterIs doing nothing a waste of a life?
- counterSchopenhauer: what is left when wanting stops is boredomWhy does the next thing never satisfy?