Reddit mentions of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

You should explore prayer and/or meditation, whichever is more your flavor.

Here are two great resources to get you started:

The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374536716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_pY1DzbXS0XHVD

Leisure: The Basis of Culture https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586172565/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_qM2Dzb3WVFBX5

I highly suggest reading both. They changed my life and I hope can help you, too.

For anyone else reading this: don't be deterred by this guy's tone, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is an excellent little book which explains that true leisure - taking the time to learn, or create - is the fundamental basis of Western culture. And it's pretty true: everyone from Socrates to Virgil to Dante to Pieper himself (as a professor and philosopher) spent significant amounts of non-working time attempting to achieve something greater than a mere occupation.

Think of the difference between a vacation and a professor's sabbatical. According to Pieper:

>We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity.

Furthermore, in abandoning TV and spending his weekends reading, this guy is trying to spend his free timeaccording to a Pieperian ideal of leisure:

>Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative, beholding, and immersion — in the real. In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of ”not-being–able–to–grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the ”trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.

However, you can't do High Leisure 24 hours a day. This Redditor illustrates this by spending some of his time bashing people on Reddit and bitching about his fellow parishioners and their iPhones and 'splaining to us how using Reddit on a desktop computer is philosophically superior to having portable devices on WiFi. Socrates illustrated it by getting drunk (read Plato's Symposium).

I'm sure Josef Pieper, being a European professor living in Saxony, Germany, went on a vacation and to a pub now and then.

What this Redditor probably needs to read along with Pieper's book on culture is his book on prudence and virtue.

I highly recommend it for an easy-to-read, Thomist organization of the four cardinal virtues of Catholicism.

Josef Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture is superb reading on this subject.

Read and engage with others! Come check out some of the conversations happening on the sub, they are incredible.

I recommend Joseph Pieper as a good starting point to "wander into the wilderness." His work "Leisure As The Basis of Culture" is easy to read and has some great questions and incites. Or Viktor Frankl's "Man Search For Meaning" may be another good place to start.

You may find somewhat long article interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/bring-back-the-sabbath.html
>Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud's, once identified a disorder he called Sunday neurosis. Every Sunday (or, in the case of a Jewish patient, every Saturday), the Sunday neurotic developed a headache or a stomachache or an attack of depression. After ruling out purely physiological causes, including the rich food served at Sunday dinners, Ferenczi figured out what was bothering his patients. They were suffering from the Sabbath.

>On that weekly holiday observed by all ''present-day civilized humanity'' (Ferenczi was writing in 1919, when Sunday was still sacred, even in Budapest, his very cosmopolitan hometown), not only did drudgery give way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach. The Sunday neurotic, rather than enjoying his respite, became distraught; he feared that impulses repressed only with great effort might be unleashed. He induced pain or mental anguish to pre-empt the feeling of being out of control.
... ... ...

>...It was only much later, after I joined the synagogue and changed my life in a million other unforeseen ways, that I developed a theory about my condition. If Ferenczi's patients had suffered from the Sabbath, I was suffering from the lack thereof. In the Darwinian world of the New York 20-something, everything -- even socializing, reading or exercising -- felt like work or the pursuit of work by other means. Had I been able to consult Ferenczi, I believe he would have told me that I was experiencing the painful inklings of sanity...

>...Customs exist because they answer a need; when they disappear, that need must be met in some other way.

>...Talk of God may disturb the secular, so they might prefer to frame the Sabbath in the more neutral context of aesthetics. The Sabbath provides two things essential to anyone who wishes to lift himself out of the banality of mercantile culture: time to contemplate and distance from everyday demands. The Sabbath is to the week what the line break is to poetic language. It is the silence that forces you to return to what came before to find its meaning.

Her article is from a generally secular jewish perspective, the lessons she learned attempting anyway, etc. If you are a Christian Tim Keller has a very good talk which references this article throughout:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux0_5zctrsI

The philosopher Josef Pieper has a somewhat dense but very interesting book along these lines as well, called Leisure: The Basis of Culture* where he talks about the difference between rest and true leisure (and was inspired by 'workaholism' of 60 years ago...when we think they had better balance!)

https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565/ref=la_B000AQ4VR2_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520461522&sr=1-1
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/767958.Leisure

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1999/1/josef-pieper-leisure-and-its-discontents
>The introduction by Eliot to Leisure, the Basis of Culture—the first of many books by Pieper to appear in English—is one sign of the seriousness with which he was regarded. Another sign was the book’s reception by reviewers. (The present edition includes excerpts from the original reviews.) The Times Literary Supplement devoted a long and admiring piece to the book, as did The New Statesman. The Spectator was briefer but no less admiring: “These two short essays … go a long way towards a lucid explanation of the present crisis in civilization.” The book was also widely noticed in this country: reviews from The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, Commonweal, and The San Francisco Chronicle are included here. The review by Allen Tate in The New York Times Book Review probably did as much as Eliot’s introduction to stimulate interest in Pieper.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture

> There seems to be an assumption that people whose basic needs are taken care of are all going to sit on their asses and watch Judge Judy all day. And I mean sure, there will be a certain percentage that does - but a) do you really want to have that cohort as your coworkers?

Work changes a person. "Free time off" for now leads to a life of inactivity. And yes, almost everyone I know would accept an offer for some free time off. And then when the next generation is coming up, they will be less likely to work when the payoff value is reduced, changing our culture and making us poor.

Leisure isn't bad. But you have to have a healthy understanding of leisure. This is a good source for starters. And leisure should never serve as a person's primary activity. Work that provides value to others (and value is often best measured through market mechanisms) is important.

I haven't read this yet, but I've been meaning to.

https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565

Dunno if that's quite what you want, but it's what popped into my head at your question.