The beauty about prioritizing leisure in your life is that you finally get to realize how degenerated most leisure activities are today. We work so hard to the extent that, when we finally take a little break from work—we have no idea how to rest and relax.
How to Waste your Time
When we hear the word “leisure”—we think of watching Netflix, scrolling TikTok, playing video games, going shopping, or spending time at the mall.
This definition is drastically misleading. Leisure historically meant freedom for social, creative, and intellectual activities.
Recall that, in Greek, leisure is rendered as scholé—this means school. The Romans had a similar word for this in Latin—otium—referring to reflection, contemplation, or the pursuit of academic interests.
Leisure must not be an escape from effort; it must be unavailable without effort.
Pure leisure paradoxically requires discipline, focus, and commitment, not an endless pursuit of dopamine.
Jash Dholani surprised me with a few facts:
Notice the “fort” in comfort. The Latin root of comfort means to fortify—to get stronger. The original sense of comfort was rest that gets you ready for war. At royal weddings, theological debates were arranged as entertainment. Logicians debated God at Prince Palatine’s engagement. Aldous Huxley wrote that, in Elizabethan times, regular people “could be relied upon” to break into complex musical acts like madrigals or motets. Some people had to “exert their minds to an uncommon degree” to entertain themselves.
We’re barely able to identify any aristocracy today who prefers amusements that require some sort of social, creative, or intellectual effort, let alone regular people.
In 1927, Mircea Eliade was complaining about how young men in Bucharest “patch up their mediocre souls” with the latest issues of La Nouvelle Revue Française or Insel Verlag. May you be blessed to be surrounded by such mediocrity today!
Not long ago, recreation was a consequence of active collaboration between family members and neighbors. The goal of baking bread, my grandma used to tell me, was not to bake bread but to make friends. Italians—largely in the south—deserve their reputation: they still gather to play cards, sing, fish, or sip coffee and wine.
You need silence to be able to imagine a brighter future. Your mind requires boredom to carve out a destiny for yourself. In a world full of distractions, boredom is no longer a mere “productivity hack”—it’s one of the highest virtues. Protect your boredom. At all costs.
Pure leisure is closely related to the art of wasting your time. This is my favorite form of happiness. And also a divine search tool for wisdom. This kind of art has been long forgotten. And it’s been forgotten because we no longer know how to take control of our free time.
Eliade came up with a bitter observation in 1934. At the time he wrote this, maybe he exaggerated—yet today, his words hit home with the precision of an arrow finding its mark:
Never before have there been so many automated, mechanized, commoditized entertainment products as we “enjoy” today… Modern amusements are designed to dominate your free time and integrate it into fake leisure activities.
Consider the cinema. You get tickets to a movie and agree to have your critical behavior dominated by the subject of the show for 2h and 23 minutes. Aldous Huxley came up with a harsh remark: “Countless audiences passively soak in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they only need to sit down, eat popcorn, and keep their eyes open.” The entire planet goes out on Saturday to watch something a bunch of fellows from Hollywood put together.
Or think of football games: Real Madrid is soon to play against Rayo Vallecano. I’m a big fan of Real Madrid—I thus confess that I’ve just entered a contract to have my eyes, ears, and feelings controlled for 90 minutes starting at 2 PM CET this Sunday. Hala Madrid!
Eliade joins the party yet again:
This kind of entertainment doesn’t give you any “free time” but rather takes it away. Mass-manufactured “leisure” activities turn you into a prisoner. The modern spirit boasts an oddly painful tendency to standardize even the most spontaneous human expressions. We globally agree to have “fun” based on the same rules, rhythm, and intensity.
Technology only makes things worse. Everyone now keeps a tiny supercomputer in our pockets that’s ready to entertain us everywhere we go. We can have a little bit of “fun” whenever we want. Boredom is a myth; silence is a fairy tale.
These are the best conditions to keep artistic cultures dead. There can be no creativity without silence and boredom since the root of any creative undertaking lies in the ability to waste your time with elegance and style, without feeling guilty.
Think of all the people living in Tokyo, London, Dubai, New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. They have something “fun” to do available at all times. Are they ever able to spend time alone, in silence, meditating on random existential crises? Do they ever get bored? Do they ever find the time to waste their time?
Paradoxically, only those who know how to waste their time are truly busy, productive, and hard-working.
I met a young man from Sweden who’s been living in the US for the last 7 years or so; he told me he barely misses his country—he finds it boring, as there’s “nothing to do”—and claims he can’t see himself living anywhere else but in a city such as Chicago or Boston.
I can’t deny the charming vibes of a couple of big cities in this world. And I can’t deny that living in a big city does bring some benefits, especially when you’re young—since your goal is to expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible. But if you dislike small, quiet, human-scaled places—you’re simply disconnected from nature. We aren’t designed to live in big cities.
The reality is, you don’t “love” living in a busy, noisy, polluted, congested, car-centric city. You’re afraid of silence and boredom because then you have to spend more time with your own thoughts, feelings, and problems. Your relationship with God or Mother Nature—whatever your theology—is under arrest. And no one can bail you out but yourself.
The quality of our leisure predicts the quality of our work.
How many of us choose to work because our ambition springs from a boundless desire to manifest ourselves spiritually? How many of us start projects, not strictly as a result of financial considerations, but because they are genuine expressions of who we want to be? Are you able to identify five true artists, scholars, philosophers, or scientists among us? Can you even name one polymath that’s not dead?
We work because we simply provide a service. We don’t have a vision to rely on. Everything is purely transactional. Just skim through Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks; notice in what frame of mind he was, and how foreign this is from our “artist” grifters. Take a look at how obsessed Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, or Kafka used to be. Do you think they had a “job” or a “hobby” or rather a mission to fulfill?
Academics have ideas. Scholars, artists, and philosophers have obsessions.
Are academics today organically interested in the subjects they claim to pursue, or do they simply narcotize their minds with the same set of concepts from 9-5, Monday-Friday to secure an ongoing employment? This is, of course, a rhetorical question.
The art of wasting your time doesn’t translate into intellectual laziness or eternal vagabonding. It’s about being open to wonder, adventure, miracle, and serendipity. It’s about being comfortable with uncertainty.
You seldom live more gracefully than when you waste your time. “Creativity starts with an empty calendar,” Naval Ravikant wrote, “and ends with a full one.” After all, only the unscheduled life is worth living.
This essay is an extension of one of my previous essays—“In Defense of Leisure”—from episode #6. I was reluctant to publish it as everything you read is based on random notes I took while reading the works of Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and Aldous Huxley; they came up with brilliant remarks about the decline of leisure, rest, and entertainment in modern societies. Accusing me of plagiarism wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake. This essay is an attempt to structure all of these comments and hopefully morph them into something useful and coherent. I quote the authors when I directly stole their writing, however, when it comes to Eliade’s work, please note that I translated most of his essays in English as they’re largely available in Romanian and French. While translating his essays, I added extra context, interpretation, and clarification. The result is predictable: I ended up butchering the entire text and came up with novel thought exercises that are only mildly related to Eliade’s genius. This doesn’t mean that they’re “original” but rather that attributing them to Eliade would be disrespectful to his legacy. The same rule applies to the other writers: my annotations give birth to divagations that, at times, have almost nothing to do with the original format in terms of substance and aesthetics.