Overwork = piss-poor leisure = work-worship

Leisure gets a bad rap because we’re bad at it

Bertrand Russell and/or Alan Watts talk about the following vicious cycle:

We emphasize work above all else in our life for 5-6 days of the week (if we’re lucky), bottling up all other aspects of our personality in the process.

We enter our free time demoralized and fried, with little creative energy left.  We feel as if we have to cram in all our fun to make up for the week of suffering, so our leisure tends to consist of blacking out, watching trash TV, maybe taking a frenzied cookie-cutter vacation, etc.  In short, stuff that puts more pressure on our body and isn’t particularly healthy.

Work-humpers then point to those activities to smear leisure and exalt work as the only state that’s “constructive.”

Rinse and repeat.

At the risk of brining toxic “work-ethic” thinking into leisure, sometimes I think we owe it to ourselves and to society to step up our leisure game. Longer breaks, intentionally used, giving the non-work parts of our soul proper time to play. Not just numbing ourselves into a stupor to escape the pain.  

Work-humpers disdain leisure because they sincerely don’t know how awesome it is. 

(Obviously this is all easier said than done, but I do believe in the power of starting with setting intentions. Consider this an intention I'm setting for myself.)