Leisure is extremely necessary for intellectual activity. There are many examples throughout history to confirm this:
- Thucydides only wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War because he was in exile for 20 years, even confirming that he was only able to document the war do it thanks to his leisure (Book 5, Chapter 26).
- Isaac Newton only developed his theories due to the plague that dominated Europe during his time.
- More recently, George R. R. Martin mentioned that he was able to significantly advance the pace of his next book, “The Winds of Winter,” due to the social distancing resulting from the 2020 pandemic.
- And even I, much smaller than everyone on this list, could use the leisure of this same pandemic to study and seek clients to make my career transition — something that would have been difficult with the intense routine of private classes I worked with before the lockdown.
It’s as if, to maximize our intellectual activity, we needed to distance ourselves a bit from the chaos of daily life and reflect a little more. I can see this clearly when I sit in a cafeteria to read and smoke a bit, leaving my phone in offline mode: suddenly, ideas begin to emerge. Ideas for stories, for professional projects, to repurpose old texts, and even to create new non-fictional texts (like this one, which is being created exactly in one of those moments)
The person who remains active all the time can never afford to stop and think, without distractions. Even mundane activities, like scrolling through Instagram, keep our brains active and prevent us from having the necessary contemplation for creation — we stop being creators and become mere consumers of increasingly lower-quality content: first, it’s trivia, then memes, and before we know it, it’s barely dressed girls dancing to horrible music.
On the other hand, idleness should not be confused with being passive, which is spending the whole day doing nothing. On the contrary: it seems to me that true leisure only arises for those who have something to do. For those with an occupation, for those who need to take care of something or someone.
I don’t want to glamorize a market-driven society, where only what you produce matters; in fact, I want to convey the idea that one should not be drowned by futile activities all day (activities whose main provider is usually the phone).
Therefore, the best solution to cultivate leisure is to work on personal projects, try to cultivate hobbies where you are less a consumer and more an active participant, and be very attentive to habits that consume most of your time: what if, instead of spending 15 minutes on social media, you spent 15 minutes doing nothing, looking out the window? It might be tedious at first, but many good ideas will come to you if you allow yourself to go through the initially uncomfortable phase.
After all, I only wrote this text because I allowed myself to stay in the cafeteria next to the gas station, having coffee alone and reading. If I had gone home right after my commitment today, I would certainly be indiscipline watching useless things on the internet and being distracted by the noise made by my family.
To conclude, I recommend the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, particularly the “Artist Date” exercise, which involves, once a week, having a date with yourself, alone, in a place where you like to be. Allow yourself to appreciate things alone.