You may, if you care, which itself would grant you membership to a very elite group, have noticed that I haven't posted anything for a week or so. This has not been a contrived endeavour on my part, in fact it has been due to the absence of such an endeavour. I've discovered, since returning home a fortnight ago, an ungovernable torpor which has left me unable, unwilling, unwhatever to write much at all. As it happens, I decided quite some time ago to write about writer's block and I have, in a display of grandest irony, been unable to complete it.
Fortunately, an hour's perusal of Twitter generously endows one with ideas, and is as efficacious as anything you could care to mention in restoring my unfaith in humanity. This has gone some way in placating the gaping abysm of creative desolation into which I am happily lodged. Hopefully, therefore, I will be able to moan about something fairly soon.
But enough self-indulgence, I must apprehend the crux of this post. What I have found to be true in this span of unimpaired leisure is that industry is exponentially harmed by any gift of free time. I have always suspected this to be the case but my summer holidays affirm it. This may be a rule true only of myself, but this does not diminish its claim to being a rule. I find I will complete far more, write far more, enjoy myself far more, when all this is tempered by unpleasantness. I recall writing a lot during sixth form, from 1am onwards when I had to be up at 8am, which fact oppressed me greatly. It is only against the backdrop of something toilsome that leisure can be efficiently appropriated. Now I have no countervailing force against which I should rebel, and this somehow removes most of the point of writing anything in the first place. At university there is a kind of sour joy to be had from missing a day's lectures to relay a soldier's experience of how shit the whole arrangement is. Prioritising writing before coursework provided a similar simulation of sybaritism and debauchery. Now I am, as a teacher might remind me, only wasting my own time. Wasting others' is far more enjoyable.
I do not merely propose that excessive spare time reduces output per hour of spare time, but that it may reduce total output itself. Certainly I have done a lot less in the last two weeks than I usually might, but I've also strangely derived less pleasure from this. I do not much savour the hours I spend in my pyjamas, watching television shows that I would, under normal service, vomit at the sight of. I cannot understand why I prefer to do boring things than interesting things, when both are as accessible. A sort of anti-utilitarianism seems to reign in my head when I'm given enough spare time.
Clearly, though, this cannot be a universal truth - this would imply that less can be accomplished in an infinite time frame than in a nonexistent one. But I do think there is an optimal balance between work and leisure. Furthermore, as I described in my last post, a large amount of the creative output of the past few hundred years has been the progeny of a life of leisure. This said, we do not know what could have been produced had these idle writers been afflicted with greater hardship. I can create things when I have a lot of free time, but there is no sense of urgency.
I suppose it can be said that leisure is a great milieu for thought, but I find that too much leisure produces too much thought. Sometimes I envy the feral nonchalance with which an animal can drift through the world, programmed as they are merely to find the next meal. Human minds are like furnaces, things need to constantly be poured into them or they will collapse under their own ferocity. If the mind cannot deconstruct something external then it will look into itself and begin to mess around with levers and switches that are best left alone. A mind will eat an arm if it must do so to survive. Leisure gives too much time and too little to use it for. So too much leisure is bad in this respect.
Anyway, the point I wish to make from all this is: sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Excessive leisure may not be quite so deleterious to others, but I find it removes any sense of struggle. I like being irritated, and this often compels me to do things I do enjoy, and this is not so viable when I am the cause of my own boredom (though I have made a good attempt at it in this post).
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