How to avoid the weisure lifestyle: deem yourself important enough for a break
I just read a new article on CNN.com that expounds on the increasingly intertwined lives of work and leisure, creating a so-called ‘weisure’ lifestyle. This is all a part of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s new book, Elsewhere, USA, in which he, according to the NY Times review, “shows himself to be a much more acute observer than analyst in his book on techno-distraction.” I’m going to ignore the atrocious decision to call the spillage of work into your everyday life ‘weisure’ because NYU is my alma mater. (But seriously, it’s hideous.)
Oriel Sullivan has done a lot of great work in this field, with studies like Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal Market Economy, and Busyness, Status Distinction and Consumption Strategies of the Income Rich, Time Poor. He’s shown that as income increases, time pressure increases: someone who makes $50 an hour feels much more pressure when he’s not working to maximize that “down time,” experiences more fragmented leisure time, and is more likely to take his work with him. Someone who’s making $9 as a data entry clerk, however, doesn’t have the same problems leaving their job when they clock out.
So, in the new ‘always-connected’ global economy, as income and disposable income increases, leisure time decreases. Oversimplification of the day: on one end, you have a lot of people with dusty yachts, and on the other, you have people with a lot of free time who can’t afford health insurance, who are often perceived as being lazy. A perceived lack of time, in a way, is the new marker of status, one in which people want to be seen as one who can’t take an hour off, lest the world crumble beneath them.
I’m reading Alain de Botton’s brilliant new book on the topic, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in which he summarizes the shift that occurred when work evolved past a necesary evil, and became something that could give us inherent meaning, overlapping with our passions and preferred leisure activities. The downside of this can be a little thing called burnout, when people don’t see the benefits of downtime. Maybe I’m missing something, but why do we say, ‘I am important and can’t stop working.’ Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, ‘I am so important that I am going to take some time off, because my genius must rest, and you will all have to deal with it’?
