Leisure Time in the Past and Present

The left thinks we need more leisure time and is using some spurious history to make their case.  We go from Medieval Europe to Ancient China to see comparisons with workers today.  

Transcript

Leisure in the Past and Today

May 2023

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them, and their value will never be known. Improve them, and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.”

 Elisabeth Elliot, Discipline: The Glad Surrender

“Organizing your leisure effectively is the highest level of civilization.”

 Bertrand Russell

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece

Proverbs, Chapter 16, Verse 27

A school of thought celebrates the life of a medieval peasant, even comparing feudal life favorably against that of modern-day workers. From “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” by Juliet B. Schor, we have this, “One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century.” Schor notes, “During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”

They even cite a 16th-century bishop who notes a schedule Tolkien’s break-addicted Hobbits might covet. “At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day; and when his hour cometh at night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools, leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth. 

James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, ca. 1570.

According to Schor, Medieval peasants depending on time and place also enjoyed midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times.

Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute is having none of it. “One of the things that irks my choler, yanks my goat if you like, is this idea that the medieval peasant led a life of incredible leisure, had to work vastly less than we poor saps ground down under capitalism have to. It’s entirely nonsense, of course. Economist Juliet Schor found that during periods of exceptionally high wages, such as in 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.

Schor (and others, for there are others who make the same claim) has looked at the labor service expected of the villein and then claimed that this was the amount of work they had to do. Nonsense: this work on the lord’s demesne was the rent payable for the peasant’s own land to farm. Something which instead added to his workload, of course, that farming his own land. Take a simple look around whatever room or location you are listening to this podcast. I will, for TMI reasons, assume that you are clothed. You probably did not sew and mend your clothes on your own. A grocery store or restaurant supplied your most recent meal; you did not seed, grow, harvest, and prepare the food yourself. The desktop upon which your PC sits was manufactured elsewhere. Your heat (or air conditioning) magically is just there. 

You do not need to collect wood and bring it into your home, more back-breaking hours. And water? Turn on the tap. Collecting water from the well or the stream to make ale or wine needed to be carried to your home, not half the year, but every single day. You have your own animals if you want milk, eggs, or meat. That means every day, and I am not talking about taking Spot or Rex for a walk but hours each day to their care.  

The reality was more like this: During the High Middle Ages, the population of Europe grew from 35 to 80 million between 1000 and 1347, probably due to improved agricultural techniques and a more mild climate. And, of course, the date 1347 was chosen intentionally as that was the beginning of the black death, in which nearly a quarter to a third of Western Europe was wiped out. So the modern-day equivalent in the US would be around 80 to 100 MILLION deaths. And we panicked over COVID.

90% of the European population remained rural peasants gathered into small communities of manors or villages. Towns grew up around castles and were often fortified by walls in response to disorder and raids. Women were subordinate to men in both the peasant and noble classes and were expected to ensure the smooth running of the household. This is a point our progressive historians always seem to omit. Not that leftist feminists will admit this but capitalism, by moving society beyond an agricultural-centric world, enabled a parity between sexes and, subsequently, opportunities for women not seen at any point prior. Capitalism is the best thing to happen to women. In medieval times Children had a 50% survival rate beyond age one and began to contribute to family life around age twelve.

This was not just Western Europe. Here is a description of the life of a Han Dynasty (220 BCE to 200 CE) peasant. Some peasants were better off than others. Some could afford oxen to pull their carts and simple wells to help draw water to irrigate their fields. Others were less fortunate. They worked with wooden hand tools and hauled water in heavy buckets across their shoulders. Peasant men did most of the physical labor around the farm. The women had two primary responsibilities: taking care of the household and weaving and sewing, providing clothing for the family, and to add to the family income.

 Most peasants dressed in plain, rough clothes. Their shirts and pants were made of scratchy cloth. Their sandals were made of straw. In winter, they wore padded clothing to keep warm. Peasants ate simple meals. They steamed much of their food in small stoves. Meals consisted of steamed dumplings - balls of cooked dough stuffed with meat or rice - small fish and tiny meat portions. In addition, peasants ate wheat or a grain called millet. In addition, many families grew ginger, garlic, and onions in their gardens. These crops could be added to their meals for flavor or sold at the market to bring in some extra money.

 Most peasants had hard lives. They worked nearly every day of the year. They were often exposed to harsh weather, including dust and windstorms, the burning sun, heavy rains, and bitter cold. Floods and severe dry weather, or drought, could quickly destroy their livelihood. Peasants whose land was destroyed or severely damaged might find themselves with no money to buy seed for the following year’s planting of crops. They might have to sell all of their tools or oxen to survive a harsh winter. After the government collected taxes from the peasants, many found themselves with little left to live on.

The concept of an American tethered to some assembly line is a dated concept, as only 11% of total jobs in the US are now manufacturing. Most are what used to be termed white collar, and any sentient person working in an office knows that breaks are not only common but frequent. Here is the reality. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men spent 5.6 hours per day in leisure and sports activities, and women 4.9 hours in 2021. 

This does not count breaks for lunch, visits to the candy machine, or chit-chat in the break room.  

In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, a sportswriter, or really a guy who writes human interest pieces that happen to be about sports, named Jason Gay states, “Around the country, youth and school programs continue to lose umpires, referees and officials at worrisome rates. 

The pandemic was a factor—with sports shut down or limited, some former officials found new work. But the No. 1 reason for leaving remains the same:  

Ugly, antisocial behavior by spectators—by parents in particular. Across youth sports, it isn’t hard to find examples of parents, spectators, coaches, and other adults confronting and threatening officials during and after games.

“Every week, we get a report of some type of physical assault against a sports official,” said Mano. “It’s mind-boggling.” I’ll say it for you: This is a societal embarrassment, another pathetic symptom of our national tantrum culture. Gay goes onto to write about other factors, including the money for travel leagues and the ability to capture plays on camera. I have another. I played youth sports back in the pre-Cambrian period, having to fight velociraptors for the fields (okay, I am not that old, just saber-toothed Tigers like Diego from the Ice Age series). One of the big deals for us kids was when the parents would see our games. 

We were not chaffered in the back of enormous black-tinted SUVs fit for a head of state as kids are today. Instead, our transport consisted mainly of two-wheeled, human-powered machines. And since our games were after school, usually at the 4:00 hour, there were parents, just a few. I noted that for my kid’s soccer games, there was almost always a parent if not both, attending not a few games but ALL of them.  

I couple this thought with the usual nonsense emanating from the mind of Bernie Sanders, a man who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and clearly has never of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, much less Mao’s Great Leap Forward. According to Juliana Kaplan and Ayelet Sheffey of the Business Insider, “Bernie Sanders thinks you should work fewer days. The progressive from Vermont chimed in on the four-day workweek debate on Twitter, writing: “With exploding technology and increased worker productivity; it’s time to move toward a four-day workweek with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs. This isn’t the first time a four-day work week has caught the attention of lawmakers — the Congressional Progressive Caucus previously endorsed the “32-Hour Workweek Act,” with Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal saying in a statement at the time that it’s “past time that we put people and communities over corporations and their profits — finally prioritizing the health, well-being, and basic human dignity of the working class rather than their employers’ bottom line.”

This cited a study in Britain where 3,000 workers said glorious things about the plan, and employers claimed they made more money. All of this is true for now. My post-pandemic association initially tried a three-day in-office, two-out policy, too much griping. So we moved to a two-day-in, three-at-home model, and everyone is happy. 

Things are relative. A worker going from 40 hours to 32 will revel in the time, again, for now. But eventually, when this becomes the modus operendi, they will want 30. Those firms progressive enough to try it are those who manage such as schedules. 

Try this scheme with air traffic controllers or the police.  

As Worstall notes, “As to why this is all being trotted out: As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. 

The US is the only leading nation without legislation on how much-paid vacation time an employee must get. There is thus a move to make such a law. Thus these rather tired misunderstandings of medieval life are being trotted out to aid in making that case.

In a piece for the Atlantic by Joe Pinsker entitled How Much Leisure Time Do the Happiest People Have?, he notes, “A new study from UCLA surveyed 35,000 Americans and found that employed people’s ratings of their satisfaction with life peaked when they had in the neighborhood of two and a half hours of free time a day. If you have more free time on your hands, your happiness is likely to go down. The study noted a negative quadratic relationship between discretionary time and life satisfaction. These results show that while having too little time is indeed linked to lower levels of life satisfaction, having more time does not continually translate to greater life satisfaction, and can even reduce it.” Commenting on this finding for INC magazine, Jessica Stillman states, “the gap between how much free time we say we have and how much we really have is striking. As is the chasm between our sense of being time-poor and the research showing we actually have the leisure time we need to live our best lives.

Why do we feel slammed even when we’re not? What explains these disparities? Time use experts offer a couple of theories. Author Laura Vanderkam, for instance, suggests the problem is often that we’re not thinking enough about our free time. Making more active and intentional use of our hours would make them count for more. If you fritter away your free time mindlessly scrolling Facebook, in other words, it’s not a huge shock that you’re going to end up wishing you had more of it.”

Note that men have higher leisure time than women. U.S. men spent an average of 49.2 daily minutes playing games and using computers for leisure, up from 36 minutes per day in the corresponding period of 2019. Women spent an average of 26.4 minutes daily on gaming and leisure computer use. And does this time create a sense of well-being and happiness that is ostensibly (but not really) Sander’s goal? One Oxford study cites positive aspects of video game playing (a study touted by several huge and influential video game companies), but this was based on one Nintendo game and a tiny sample. On the contrary, a National Institutes of Health study found, “Our findings indicate that there is an association between daily exposure to violent video games and a number of depressive symptoms among preadolescent youth.” When studies conflict, it is time to lean on something lacking in much discourse today, common sense. That tells us that too much of a good thing may be harmful. 

If your free time involves standing on the sidelines of an 11-year-old baseball game and conflating your child’s success with your self-worth, that is also a harmful use of time and is liable to create even more stress and stress sense of lost time. 

Stillman adds, “The exact mix of reasons for feeling time-poor probably vary by the person (and a few of us are actually time-poor, though statistically speaking it’s unlikely you’re one of them), but the central takeaway of all this science and expert advice remains constant -- you probably have all the time you need to be happy. It’s your mindset and your behavior that needs an adjustment more than your schedule.” We in 21st century America have been given a gift. It is within our own agency whether we squander it.