Work, Leisure, Play

“This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled.”
--Aristotle

Is it important to distinguish between work and leisure? Or work and play?
Do we even really understand what leisure is? We seem to have this idea that leisure should be 'productive' or at least lead to productive work. Is this what leisure is really about?
What would leisure be like in a society with UBI (Universal Basic Income)?
What would you do if you really could do anything you wanted with your time? Does the idea of totally being able to decide what you do with your time a little unsettling? Do you think you would work well to be responsible to no-one but yourself for what you get done?
Is the scariness of too much freedom what makes people crave authority? We've talked about 'freedom from' vs. 'freedom to' before, does this apply to the question of work and leisure?


Work-Life Balance?
The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest things to master in life, and one of the most important. We, both as a culture and as individuals, often conflate it with the deceptively similar-sounding yet profoundly different notion of “work/life balance” — a concept rather disheartening upon closer inspection. It implies, after all, that we must counter the downside — that which we must endure in order to make a living — with the upside — that which we long to do in order to feel alive. It implies allocating half of our waking hours to something we begrudge while anxiously awaiting the other half to arrive so we can live already. What a woefully shortchanging way to exist — lest we forget, so speaks Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.