Thoreau, Leisure, and the One-Day Work Week

 Many people are coming around to the idea of a four-day workweek. But if you ask Henry Thoreau, one day should be sufficient. It's not quite the Four-Hour Work Week claimed by ideas guru and motivational writer Timothy Ferris, but it is a challenge to the daily grind that left so many Americans, in the words of ol' Henry, living "lives of quiet desperation."

Thoreau challenged the idea that man's life must be consumed by work and the pursuit of wages that would allow him to purchase what Adam Smith called "the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life." Whereas Smith and his theories about the new capitalism of the early 19th century used the exchange of labor for that trio as a measurement of a person's "wealth," Thoreau countered that a "man is wealthy in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." Or, in other words, there are two ways to be wealthy: acquire more or require less. 

The way Thoreau phrased it according to his experiment of living life at Walden Pond for two years was:

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

And in the reference I made to the one day of work, he sardonically -- and in some people's estimation blasphemously -- asserted about the Sabbath:

The order of things should be reversed; the seventh day should be the day of toil...and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widerspread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.

The idea of work, and what we are giving up in the constant pursuit of a paycheck was the subject of a piece of commentary in the Washington Post "We should be living in the golden age of hobbies. What happened?"

It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?” The answer should be easy. We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.”

But the golden age that Keynes predicted has not come to pass. Though productivity has grown dramatically since Keynes’s time, the most recent American Time Use Survey found that full-time employees still work eight hours a day, the same workday that the National Labor Union demanded in 1866. Workers enjoy just under four hours of leisure time, and the bulk of that brief window is spent watching TV. The odds are stacked against hobbies. “Work has been supercharged with meaning and purpose and identity, a charge that it never had, at least for the majority of people,” Hunnicutt said. The seamlessness of streaming and the narcotic effects of scrolling make every other activity feel effortful. To pay the bills, huge swaths of Americans take on “side hustles” during hours that earlier generations might have spent building model trains or singing in a choir.