Is doing nothing a waste of a life?
Bertrand Russell
Russell thought the opposite: that the belief work is virtuous in itself is one of the more successful pieces of propaganda in history.
His 1932 essay makes a simple argument. Technology multiplied what an hour of labour produces many times over. That gain could have been taken as time; it was taken as more output instead. The four-hour day was available and was not chosen, and the reason is moral rather than economic — we believe idleness is a defect of character.
He calls this the and notes who benefits from other people holding it. The morality of work, he observed, is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
The objection arrives immediately: people given free time will squander it. Russell's answer is about capacity. Exhausted people want passive amusement because that is all they have left; rested people make things, argue, learn, organise. What looks like proof that leisure is wasted is usually evidence of how depleted the leisure is. This is his case for — not indolence but the ordinary human activity that fatigue makes impossible.
The uncomfortable part is personal rather than political. Most of us do not have less because we are forbidden it. We have it and cannot occupy it.