In his highly effective e book “The Burnout Society,” South Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han argues that in fashionable society, people have an crucial to obtain. Han calls this an “achievement society” wherein we should turn out to be “entrepreneurs” – branding and promoting ourselves; there isn’t any day off the clock.
In such a society, even leisure dangers changing into one other type of work. Rather than providing rest and meaning, leisure is commonly aggressive, performative and exhausting.
People feeling strain to self-promote, for instance, may spend their free time posting pictures of an athletic race or an elaborate trip on social media
to be considered by household, pals and potential employers, including to exhaustion and burnout.
As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I research connections between unhealthy forms of leisure and burnout. I’ve discovered that philosophy may also help us navigate a few of the pitfalls of leisure in an achievement society. The celebrated Greek thinker Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 B.C.E., specifically, can offer important insights.
Aristotle on self-development
Aristotle begins the well-known “Nicomachean Ethics” by mentioning that we’re all looking for happiness. But, he says, we are sometimes confused about how to get there.
AzmanL/E+ via Getty images
Aristotle believed that pleasure, wealth, honor and energy won’t in the end make us completely happy. True happiness, he stated, required moral self-development: “Human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue.”
In different phrases, if we would like to be completely happy, Aristotle contended, we should make reasoned decisions to develop habits that, over time, turn out to be character traits reminiscent of braveness, temperance, generosity and truthfulness.
Aristotle is explicitly linking the good life to changing into a sure type of particular person. There is not any shortcut to moral self-development. It takes time – day off the clock, time not engaged in some type of entrepreneurial self-promotion.
Aristotle can also be telling us concerning the energy of our decisions. Habits, he argues, aren’t nearly motion, but in addition motives and character. Our actions, he says, truly change our needs. Aristotle says: “By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them.”
In different phrases, good habits are the results of moving incrementally in the suitable path by observe.
For Aristotle, good habits lead to moral self-development. The converse can also be true. To this finish, for Aristotle, having good friends and mentors who guide and support moral development are essential.
How Aristotle helps us perceive leisure
In an achievement society, we are sometimes conditioned to reply to exterior pressures to self-promote. We could as a substitute look to pleasure, wealth, honor and energy for happiness. This can sidetrack the moral growth required for true happiness.
True leisure – leisure that’s not certain to the crucial to obtain – is time we are able to replicate on our actual priorities, domesticate friendships, suppose for ourselves, and step again and resolve what sort of life we would like to dwell.
The Greek phrase “eudaimonia,” typically translated merely as happiness, is the time period Aristotle makes use of to describe human thriving and flourishing. According to thinker Jane Hurly, Aristotle views “leisure as essential for human thriving.” Indeed, “for both Plato and Aristotle leisure … is a prerequisite for the achievement of the highest form of human flourishing, eudaimonia,” as thinker Thanassis Samaras argues.
While we could have restricted means to purchase pleasure, wealth, honor and energy, Aristotle tells us that we now have management over a very powerful variable within the good life: what sort of particular person we are going to turn out to be. Leisure is essential as a result of it’s time wherein we get to resolve what sort of habits we are going to develop and what sort of particular person we are going to turn out to be. Will we capitulate to achievement society? Or make the most of our free time to develop ourselves as people?
When leisure is preoccupied with entrepreneurial self-promotion, it’s troublesome for ethical growth to happen. Free time that’s not hijacked by the crucial to obtain is required for the event of a constant relationship to oneself – what I name a relationship of self-solidarity – a type of reflective self-awareness obligatory to purpose on the proper goal and make ethical decisions. Without such a relationship, the good life will stay elusive.
Leisure reimagined
Rather than adopting the achievement society’s formulation of the good life, we could find a way to formulate our personal imaginative and prescient. Without one’s personal imaginative and prescient, we danger changing into mired in unhealthy habits, main us away from the ethical growth by which the good life turns into potential.
Aristotle makes it clear that we now have the facility to change not solely our behaviors however our desires and character. This self-development, as Aristotle writes, is a necessary part of the good life – a lifetime of eudaimonia.
The decisions we make in our free time can transfer us nearer to eudaimonia. Or they may transfer us within the path of burnout.