Why we must seize leisurely interludes from work’s confines | Aeon Essays

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‘Sense of belonging’, in fact, has become a buzzword in human resources offices over the past decade or so. Nearly every setting where work is performed – from the college campus to the corporation – has taken up the rallying cry of cementing an attachment to place. The literature on sense of belonging is clear on the benefits to workers: enhanced performance, motivation and commitment, as well as heightened feelings of safety and security. In many respects, though, the ultimate beneficiary is the organisation itself, which has a vested interest in cultivating the ties – or tethers – that bind us. It is a small step from connectedness to capture, where the sense of belonging is an organisation’s sense that its subjects belong to it. ⤴️

In The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2009), Byung-Chul Han suggests that our experience of intervals is being ‘destroyed in order to produce total proximity and simultaneity’. When everything (and everyone) is within reach at all times, we lose a sense of what it means to be in – and even to savour – transitional states of in-betweenness. As an antidote, Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos recommend that we ‘tarry with time’ and ‘make spaces for the play of purposeless action’. ⤴️

When everything (and everyone) is within reach at all times, we lose a sense of what it means to be in – and even to savour – transitional states of in-betweenness. As an antidote, Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos recommend that we ‘tarry with time’ and ‘make spaces for the play of purposeless action’. ⤴️

indeed, this seems the very appeal of going on vacation, of rest, of social detox and the antihetis of social overload. we are told we are a social species, but we arenot entirely social beings.

On one level, disengagement can be understood as an effort to slip apparatuses of control wherever we encounter them. Think of this as a strike for worker empowerment. The bigger question, though, is whether we can ever really escape the toil and trouble for good. It often seems as if we are doomed to sustain the systems and structures that suspend us in cycles of weariness, overwhelm or misery. ⤴️

What society cannot countenance, it seems, is prolonged disengagement, which tends to be conflated with civic apathy or indifference. ⤴️

It is often only in the interludes that we come to realise just how much our busy lives are an active conspiracy against the very things that supposedly give our existence a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Little interruptions of the usual can be an invitation to pause and reflect, a rare opportunity for the deep noticing and heightened awareness that ritual and routine often obscure. ⤴️

This is the impetus for keeping a journal, for stealing moments from the night to collect ourselves - indeed to earn respite from “the modernworlsd”

It is often only in the interludes that we come to realise just how much our busy lives are an active conspiracy against the very things that supposedly give our existence a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Little interruptions of the usual can be an invitation to pause and reflect, a rare opportunity for the deep noticing and heightened awareness that ritual and routine often obscure. ⤴️

indulge what the literary critic A D Nuttall in Dead from the Waist Down (2003) called ‘the invisible life, the life of the mind’. That language is vanishing from our culture, where the patter and patterns of the corporation increasingly take root; observable outcomes, measurable impact and performative productivity are what count (and are counted), as everyone knows by now. Nevertheless, and much to the chagrin of those who envisage a world where human effort is always and clearly in the service of public priorities, there is no getting around the fact that much of intellectual labour is, at base, a private affair, one that is substantially located in the act (and in times and spaces) of withdrawal. ⤴️

“The attraction of a life of leisure ought not to be the prospect of a lazy inactivity, but the chance for the investigation and discovery of truth”.’ ⤴️