The Price of Leisure

In Zena Hitz’s essay, “What is Time For?,” she makes the case that leisure requires something of us. In a Substack post last year, where I reflected on Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings, I treated the idea of leisure and the important role it plays in our lives—it is that for which we do everything else.

It may seem ironic on its face, that for which we do everything else would require something of us. But further reflection would reveal all that we do to achieve those moments of leisure is that something that is required of us, namely work.

But there is still something else, according Hitz. There is also the cultivation of habits and the communities that support and approximate those habits. In other words, leisure requires what she calls, interior discipline. But that is not all. It surprisingly requires sacrifice. Hitz breaks it down for us thus:

It is not enough to simply choose a central life activity that is intrinsically leisurely. One must recognize the good of leisure and seek it out. Moreover, leisure might require sacrifice. A less lucrative job might permit more time with one’s family. A less prestigious academic post might permit a greater focus on studying and contemplative teaching.((Zena Hitz et al., “What Is Time For?,” essay, in The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2023), 20–33, 33.)) 

She then cites the examples of Ambrose, Renée, and Ratushinskaya, each his or her own way, demonstrating the value of sacrificing for leisure and the possibility of achieving it.

Ambrose found time to read in the margins, in the midst of his busyness. So did Renée, the heroine of the 2009 film, The Hedgehog, a humble building concierge who finds her real life in the times she sequesters to herself to a hidden room to read philosophy, literature, and the classics. Ratushinskaya is a Russian dissident imprisoned in Siberia who writes poetry in bars of soap with matchsticks. I wonder what I would or should be willing to sacrifice to prioritize leisure?