Menace of leisure
If you follow these cerebrations with anything like attention, you will know that this subject is one of the hobby horses I choose to ride from time to time.
It is the problem of how to be a bum with grace and without guilt. It’s already one of the bigger problems of the late 20th century, and it’s going to get bigger.
We were talking yesterday about the fear of silence. This is, in its way, but a subdivision of a rather larger horror, the fear of leisure, or, as I call it, the menace of leisure.
The average American working week was 60 hours in 1900. It is 40 now, and there are many who think it will be 20 when the new century opens it doors.
Is homo Americanus up to it? Can he cope with all this free time? Does he have a high bum quotient?
Einstein is credited with saying, “The enjoyment of impractical pleasures is necessary for a balanced life.”
Americans have a perfectly morbid talent for turning leisure into work. If an American builds a model airplane in his garage, it alluva sudden has to be the best model airplane built by anyone, and especially by anyone in the neighborhood.
In short, he gets competitive, which is to lose the point of the whole thing. What might be fun, and certainly would be therapeutic, would be to build a model plane that could not possibly fly. Ever.
Shorter hours of work have caused a thing, which some people call “the cultural explosion” and which to me is as phony as a Marlboro Man. Thousands hear more Bartok quartets than they ever heard before.
But I still say people listen to music they hate not because it is useless and beautiful, which are the only reasons for listening to music, but because the guy who sells used cars for the opposition company listens to it. Remember the hula-hoop? Competitive.
America was brought up on the sound Calvinistic idea that hard work was everything, and that doing nothing and enjoying it was pernicious, and even French. Until this notion is extirpated, the average Yank will never be able to enjoy impractical pleasures, and thus the balanced life.
We have our con men, to be sure; but Mr. Every-Yank feels he has the morals and manners of a gigolo if he engages in an enterprise of no obvious value simply because it pleases what is left of his acrid little soul.
Nowhere is the fear of leisure more evident than in the more-or-less new phenomenon of moonlighting, holding more than one job at a time.
These secondary jobs often serve a psychological rather than an economic need, I am told. There are those who say men take them to get away from their wives. The sociologist David Riesman speaks of “honey-do days.” These are days when men keep the hell out of the house because wifie is always saying “Honey, do this” and “Honey, do that.”
I don’t buy that, really. I think the whole thing is due to immaturity. A man is not a whole man until he is able to engage in an enterprise, which almost everybody else in the world thinks demented. A man is not a whole man until he can be a bum, unashamed, for a good part of his life.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle Nov. 29, 1966.
Nowhere is the fear of leisure more evident than in the more-or-less new phenomenon of moonlighting, holding more than one job at a time.