“A time like the present seems, of all times, not to be a time to speak of ‘leisure.’”
Just three years after the second world war, German philosopher Josef Pieper opened his essay, Leisure: the Basis of Culture, well-aware that leisure would not seem urgent to most during Germany’s existential post-war reconstruction.
But this painful time of rebuilding, Pieper argued, offered a rare chance for society to incorporate the “whole of its existence”—the joy of spending time with family, producing and consuming art, exercising, communing with nature—instead of just focusing on maximizing...
