#49: True Leisure & Tyranny of Total Work

#SeekingSignificance #BeginnersMind #JobsAreGood #TyrannyOfTotalWork

Dec 15, 2023

👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!

This week’s discovery:

🧑🏼‍🚀 The Tragic Destiny of Seeking Significance
🐥 The Beginner’s Mind
💼 Jobs Are Good, Actually
🏓 True Leisure and the Tyranny of Total Work
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

🧑🏼‍🚀 The Tragic Destiny of Seeking Significance

Humans are driven to be significant and make a lasting impact on the world. This desire stems from a mythical hero system deeply ingrained in society. Whether through religious or secular means, individuals seek a feeling of cosmic specialness and ultimate meaning. They strive to carve out a place in nature, creating structures and legacies that reflect human value. The belief is that these creations will outlast death and decay, proving that humans and their products hold lasting worth. The modern fascination with science and technology is seen as a contemporary version of this hero myth. It is a hopeful belief that science, money, and goods elevate humans above other animals. However, all human actions, though seen as religious and heroic, are also susceptible to being fictional and fallible.

🎧 Listen - 3min

🐥 The Beginner’s Mind

This is a snippet from an article written by my great friend Igor on the book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind". Igor writes a newsletter that provides tech news, career tips, and handpicked job listings for Berliners who want to advance their career.

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, "Oh, this pace is terrible!" But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress. It is like studying a foreign language; you cannot do it all of a sudden, but by repeating it over and over you will master it.

📖 Read - 7min

💼 Jobs Are Good, Actually

Yes, jobs require you to give up some of your time, labor, and autonomy. For some, this cost isn’t worth it. But for the vast majority of people, it’s a worthwhile exchange. A job can be a vehicle for changing the world or deriving fulfillment, but many people do not work to self-actualize; they work to survive. Although we love to romanticize those who have found a way to escape the rat race, there’s nothing wrong with having a 9-to-5.

A job can provide a stable routine, which can be beneficial for career growth and financial security, especially in your early career years. It offers the predictability and structure that can help balance professional growth with personal interests and hobbies.

📖 Read - 4min

🏓 True Leisure and the Tyranny of Total Work

The combination of the fear of finitude and perception of work as virtuous gives rise to a phenomenon called total work, which was coined by German philosopher Josef Pieper. Total work is a state of being where work is the central and defining focus of life. Put another way, total work is what happens when leisure ceases to exist. According to Pieper, leisure is the capacity to “just be” without the need for distraction. Consider what happens when you have nothing in particular to occupy your attention. Often, it’s in these moments that you find challenging feelings becoming more salient in your awareness. This is the loop that keeps driving so many of us back to distraction.
Leisure is not a break from work, because to decide to take time off from work is to assert that life is defined by work. In the same way as a weekend is defined in relation to the week, vacations and similar things that may look like leisure are in fact defined in relation to work. Leisure is the absence of the concept of work altogether. Leisure is what happens in the spaces where you’re neither “actively working” nor “not actively working.” And as work becomes more total, leisure becomes more difficult to access. This is a problem, because not only is leisure where all of the rest of your life happens, away from work; it also provides the spaciousness necessary to surface things that really matter.

📖 Read - 8min