Why Leisure?

Leisure. What Does It Mean and Where Does It Lead?

I get asked ‘Why Leisure?”, “What got you interested in this?” quite a bit.

And since I have been asked this question a lot, I figured I would tell all about where my head is at.

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Among my friends and other people in my life I notice an anxiety - with everything, material things, relationships, the future, the past. And honestly, seeing my people this way upsets me. Questions of how to live in an uncertain world with so many unpredictable variables are not only common but having too many can be crippling. There are many ways people manage this cultural anxiety, some get jacked, some take the entrepreneurial path, these, amongst others, are valid ways of handling this emotional reality. The unhealthy, yet just as common, ways include drug abuse & general neglectfulness. While there are material ways of dealing with this anxiety what interests me is the emotional side. (Note: this interest may be genetic, my father and my grandmother are both extremely overeducated & over-credentialed in the field of psychology which was something that played a big role in our home growing up.

Leisure represents an emotional liberation, and it’s this emotional liberation people seek which got me interested in leisure. And I realized that in order to get to this emotional - you could even call it spiritual - liberation there are ideas we will need to abandon in order to get there. Leisure is detachment from bad beliefs, exploiters, & fear mongers, in order to engage with the world how you were meant to. It is the process of elimination that reveals what is really there, and what was there the whole time. In this sense, leisure is no different than asceticism, hesychasm, flanuering, & meditation, they are all closely related, and are all crucial ingredients in emotional liberation.

The truth is, some of our trauma is self-inflicted. We believe a lot of dogshit, a lot of dogshit that not only is false but it is also damaging, and because of that we end up shooting ourselves in the foot crippling ourselves. When I say bad beliefs I mean the core beliefs of narcissism & nihilism - which I can report due to lived experience - are unsustainable & unhealthy ways of living. For this reason I believe that a life spent abandoning bad beliefs is a life well spent, and doing so is just a part of the leisure process.

As I was thinking about how I could abandon all the bad ideas I held to be true I realized there has to be some sort of first principle that was considered good, something that under all circumstances would be good, no matter what. This was hard for me to wrestle with, partly because I am not very educated and due to my profound naivete I read & interpret most things charitably, not critically. So trying to figure out what could be objectively “good” was tough.

It was at this moment in my wrestling I stumbled on Tom Holland’s Dominion.

Along with Tom and other writers like David Bentley Hart, I was made aware of our cultural “good”, the underlying principle that has formed us all, which they argue is The Christian Ethic. Hidden to me since it is so ingrained in every westerner it is no longer obvious to the naked eye - after all it is very hard to see the water you are swimming in.

Three years ago if you would have asked me if I would be interested even slightly in Christian apologetics I would have laughed in your face, so this is just as surprising to me as it would be to others. But the pricelessness of emotional liberation means doing anything to attain it. So here I am at the foot of the Christian Ethic & trying to figure out just what it is, and if this set of beliefs is better compared to what we already believe today. Holland’s Dominion help me familiarize myself with historical Christianity which, granted, there are many versions of, but all of which are still vastly different than the Christianity taking place in America today. As of now, I am not religious, and I don’t even know if I would consider myself a “believer”, maybe the question in itself is dumb, maybe I am & I just don’t know what that means.

Besides, I am fine being either.

The bigger point being the theological realm must be investigated in order to deal with things holistically. Some may say we don’t need God in order to live but there is a God sized hole in every individual & in every society, it’s not a matter of it the throne is occupied or not, only a matter of what occupies it. As I understand it, the study of that occupancy is theology, an understudied & desperately needed field of study.

The Christian Ethic is a complicated one - and maybe an impossible one - since it can be interpreted in so many ways. Even then, it is worth diligently examining if we want to take our freedom seriously, since it is the Christian standards we measure our own freedom by, for that very reason Christianity should be taken seriously.

So this is where my search for leisure and emotional liberation have led me. I now try to square them with what it means to be able to emotionally thrive and how we get there.

We are not always in charge of our material situation, to believe so would be unfair, but there is something, even a little something, we can do within ourselves to put us in better mental standing, because I believe - no matter how naively - that we weren’t meant to be an anxious & troubled people.

We are meant for better things, like chilling.

We will see where this takes us.

Love always, - Ya boy, L.o.L.