The obligation to profit shapes our experience of time: minute to minute, as we hustle to catch the train to work; day to day, as we calculate whether we have enough cat food to avoid the 6 PM supermarket crush; and decade to decade, as we spend years preparing for work and equate our adulthood with climbing the professional ladder. Anyone who has had to cancel plans with friends, put an infant into day care before he or she felt comfortable doing so, or work through a migraine knows how unforgiving the demands of profit are, how they brook no disruption, from personal trauma to simple fatigue. [...]
Other sectors, particularly service and retail, have instituted just-in-time scheduling, leaving employees with no idea when or how long they will be working. These workers cannot enroll their children in regular childcare, buy a weekly bus pass, or make plans with friends and family. They often get stuck near their jobs in airports or outlying shopping centers with hours of “garbage time” between shifts — time they could be relaxing at home or enjoying a hobby. [...]
In a society free from the burdens of profit, leisure could become more central to human experience. Today, we often conflate leisure with idleness and idleness with immorality, but it need not be so. Indeed, a Latin word for “business,” negotium, reveals how seriously some societies used to take non-laboring time. Negotium literally means the absence (indicated by the prefix neg-) of leisure (otium). Romans, in other words, described business in negative terms, as the mundane stuff one does when not attending to the enjoyable aspects of living. While we would not wish to return to ancient Rome’s patriarchal, slave-owning society, we could do with taking leisure more seriously. [...]
Would we still live our lives according to workweeks and career paths? Many might. But instead of seeking a work/life balance, we might just have life: our time on earth in which the activities of living — convalescence, child rearing, friendship, daydreaming, bereavement — get their due alongside labor.
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