Leisure

🙋

I think I’ve heard it said that only leisure can breed creativity.

Is that true? Can you help me find where it comes from?

🤖

The closest line is Hobbes, in Leviathan:

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

He argued that when people are busy every day securing the necessities of survival and defending against enemies, they have no room to observe the world systematically; only when society is stable enough and people have leisure can philosophy and knowledge grow.

There are three related lines of thought:

In the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle repeatedly discusses scholē (leisure), holding that we are busy in order to have leisure, and that real thinking, virtue and the life of the intellect require leisure. “Leisure” isn’t entertainment or lying flat; it’s what a person can finally do, once no longer filled up by the tasks of survival — activities not done to be immediately useful.

The ancient Greek scholē originally meant “leisure”; via the Latin schola, it later became the English “school.”

In Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), Josef Pieper used exactly this to argue that culture itself depends on people having space not taken up by utilitarian goals.

Then there’s the modern version closest to what you said about “creativity” — Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness (1932).

Russell’s argument is direct: if everyone’s energy is consumed by making a living and working, all that’s left is passive entertainment; historically, art, science and philosophy came largely from people with leisure. He thought that if a person’s creative work didn’t have to cater to others to earn a living, originality would be less constrained.

But scientifically, “only leisure breeds creativity” is too absolute

Modern psychology has indeed found a very close phenomenon, called the incubation effect:

you first work seriously on a problem, then step away from it for a while — go for a walk, take a shower, do something with a light cognitive load, let your mind wander — and when you come back, you sometimes have better new ideas.

Creativity isn’t produced by “busyness” or “leisure” alone, but needs the two to alternate: engage first, then let go.

Without the material, experience and focus beforehand, leisure may just be emptiness; but if you’re constantly taking in, constantly solving problems, constantly chasing output, the brain gets no chance to recombine that material.

That may also be why many real ideas don’t come from “trying hard to think” in front of a computer, but pop up suddenly while walking, showering, cooking, riding somewhere, or even while doing nothing at all.

So…

—

There’s no topic waiting in the candidate pool for the moment, so Day 86’s place is left to the blank space.

What follows is something shared by a human, occasionally using a language faculty that has rusted: zero-token content.

The most beautiful metaphor I’ve heard came, I think, many years ago, after I failed to get into a PhD: a would-be “advisor” wrote in an email that music is music because of the silence between the notes; take that away and the melody no longer exists.

Mm, a beautiful way to see it

Sometimes I think back to things from childhood. My mom and dad’s days seemed to sway along very regularly then. Free time was simple: relaxing, a walk, making something tasty to feed the kids, or perhaps welcoming a friend who dropped by unannounced, like Su Shi going out at night to find his friend Zhang Huaimin. Everything seemed very simple.

I don’t know when it started, but my own life seems to have taken on a feeling of not being able to stop. Maybe it’s the anxiety and fear inside that can’t stop, maybe it’s the urge to do something that can’t stop. AI has sped up productivity enormously, yet working hours keep getting longer? It seems to have become hard to simply sit down and do something boring and useless, or nothing at all.

I don’t know when it started, but I seem to have forgotten how to “play”?