The Forgotten Bargain.

There is a particular expression that crosses the face of a certain kind of American visitor at about a quarter to noon on a Tuesday, in a café in Cluj or Lyon or Trieste, when he looks up from his phone and registers that the three men at the next table, all of working age, all apparently solvent, have been sitting over the ruins of their espressos for upwards of an hour, discussing nothing that could be called actionable, and showing no signs of concluding. It is not envy, or not only envy. Envy would be simpler. The expression contains a measure of genuine moral offense, the look of a churchgoer who has wandered into the wrong building and found the congregation worshipping incorrectly. The word for what he feels, if we are being precise, is contempt.

The contempt is usually rationalized in economic terms, and the rationalization is where everyone, defenders and prosecutors alike, goes wrong. The prosecution counts vacation days, early retirements, the thirty-five-hour week, the August in which entire countries go conspicuously dark, and concludes that Europe is a continent living beyond its means, subsidizing its naps with borrowed money. The defense counts the same things and calls them civilization. Both sides are doing accounting, and the accounting misses the asset entirely. The vacation days are not the wealth; they are the fence around the wealth. The wealth is a capacity: the trained, maintained, intergenerationally transmitted ability to do nothing productive with one's time, on purpose, at length, without guilt, and without narrating it afterward as recovery, recharging, or self-care. Call it strategic idleness. The European has not merely negotiated time off from his employer. He has kept the skill of spending that time on nothing, which is a different and much rarer possession, and the one thing the visitor at the next table cannot buy.

That this should register as sacrilege rather than mere inefficiency tells you the dispute is theological. Max Weber traced the genealogy a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905): a religious tradition in which work was evidence of election, in which time wasted was the gravest of sins, gradually shed its God and kept its guilt. Benjamin Franklin had already supplied the catechism in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): "time is money," three words that sound like a proverb and operate like a curse, because anything that can be converted into money can be squandered, and a squanderable hour can never again be an innocent one. Under this dispensation the American mind can forgive almost anything. It forgives failure generously; failure is a stage of the journey. It cannot forgive unproductive contentment. The unemployed man is a project; the idle man is a heresy. He is not failing to produce. He is declining to, which is far worse, because it implies the whole cathedral was optional.

And here is the joke buried in the foundations, the one the industrious mind has worked hardest to forget: industry was sold, originally and explicitly, as a machine for manufacturing idleness. Every engine, every loom, every line of code since has been pitched the same way, as a servant that would free its owner. The bargain was never less work for more work. It was less work for more life. Paul Lafargue, Marx's own son-in-law, argued in The Right to Be Lazy (1880) that three hours of daily labor would suffice once the machines were properly harnessed. The American labor movement of 1886 marched under a banner that did not mention productivity at all: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. John Maynard Keynes, no romantic, predicted in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) that his grandchildren would work perhaps fifteen hours a week and face, as their chief difficulty, the problem of filling the rest. Bertrand Russell, in In Praise of Idleness (1932), proposed four hours and suspected even that was generous.

The productivity arrived on schedule. It doubled, and doubled again, and kept doubling. The grandchildren are here, and they are answering email at eleven at night. What happened is not that the bargain was broken; broken bargains get litigated. The bargain was forgotten, which is cleaner. The gains were converted, decade after decade, into more production, larger inventories, and the felt obligation to want things nobody had yet thought to want, and the destination was quietly deleted from the itinerary while everyone admired the speed of the vehicle. Thorstein Veblen saw the residue early, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): a country in which the only respectable leisure is leisure that performs, that displays wealth or restores the worker to working condition. Rest as maintenance. The weekend as pit stop. The vacation, when finally taken, itemized into an itinerary so dense it requires a recovery period, which is then deferred.

Seen from inside that loop, the European idler is not a foreigner with different customs. He is a creditor. He is the man who collected on the very debt the American has agreed, at considerable psychic cost, to forget was ever owed. His long lunch is not a lunch; it is an open ledger. This is why the contempt has the heat that it does, the heat we reserve for people who remind us of the clause we signed away. Nobody despises a stranger's bad bargain. We despise the neighbor who kept what we sold.

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But the European afternoon, for all its statutes and its sobremesa (the Spanish have a word for the hour spent at the table after the meal has ended, which is the kind of vocabulary a civilization develops only around things it intends to keep), is still idleness as a negotiated settlement: time wrested from work, defended by law and custom, with the union steward and the August calendar standing guard. Travel east and south and you meet an older idleness that owes nothing to any bargain, because it predates the party of the second part. Richard Burton, in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), circled around the Arabic notion of kayf, which he rendered as "the savouring of animal existence": the capacity to sit in the shade, fully awake, wanting nothing, narrating nothing, and to experience this not as waiting but as the thing itself.

What makes this idleness harder for the industrial mind to read is precisely that it was never entirely chosen. Above a certain temperature, and the latitudes in question pass that temperature by mid-morning for half the year, sustained afternoon labor is not virtuous; it is stupid, and occasionally fatal. The noon legislates. The siesta and the qaylulah (the midday rest that Islamic tradition does not merely permit but recommends) are not loopholes in the work ethic; they are treaties with the sun, signed several millennia before anyone thought to measure output per hour. The Western visitor, arriving at ten and departing at five, sees shuttered shops and men motionless over tea and diagnoses lethargy, then flies home before evening, when the streets fill and the commerce and the conversation run past midnight. He has mistaken a different distribution of the day for the absence of one. And because there is no contract to point to, no statute, no union hall, he cannot file this idleness under "benefits, excessive" where he files the European kind; so he files it under fatalism, which is the industrial mind's word for any wisdom it cannot trace to a negotiation.

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The hardest case, the one that quietly breaks the prosecution's whole theory, is Japan, because Japanese idleness does not look like idleness at all. It looks like work. It is work: work slowed down past the point where the word still means what an economist means by it. The shokunin, the craftsman, will spend a span of years on apprentice tasks that produce nothing, wringing towels, cooking rice, sharpening blades, before being permitted to touch the actual material; the tea ceremony codified by Sen no Rikyū in the sixteenth century devotes trained hours and a purpose-built architecture to the correct preparation of a single bowl of tea; the aesthetic tradition reserves a word, ma, for the interval, the deliberate emptiness between things, and treats that emptiness as a component of the form rather than a gap in it. This is idleness folded inside labor: attention dilated until production becomes almost incidental to the act, a residue the work leaves behind rather than its purpose.

The productivity mind cannot dismiss this, because the output is inconveniently superb. It cannot absorb it either, because the ratio is a scandal: sixty years of a man's mornings against a bowl you could approximate by machine before lunch. So it does the third thing, which is to museumify. It makes documentaries. It puts the word craftsmanship on the marketing pages of software that ships weekly. It invokes the shokunin at conferences, from the stage, to an audience checking email. It admires Japanese patience the way one admires a tiger at the zoo: sincerely, at a remove, with no intention whatsoever of living with it.

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Three idlenesses, then, which are three answers to the only question that matters here, namely what time is for. Europe answers: time is defended from work, and what is defended is spent, gloriously, on nothing. The East answers: time is conceded to the sun, and the concession, having never been a choice, became a depth. Japan answers: time is dissolved into the work itself, until the work becomes a form of attention and attention, as we have argued in these pages before, is simply idleness wearing an apron. And the industrious answer, the one held with the most conviction and defended with the most contempt: time is for converting into money, which is converted into devices that save time, which is reinvested, immediately and in full, into more work. It is the only one of the four that is a loop, and the only one whose adherents report, in survey after survey, that they are running out of the very thing the whole system was built to mint.

The capacity is not a birthright, which is the hopeful part. It is a skill, and skills atrophy and can be retrained, one defended lunch at a time, one afternoon spent scandalously on nothing. The men at the next table are not falling behind. They are sitting on the inheritance. The espressos have been finished for an hour. Nobody has checked the time, because nobody is owed it.

— Leo Umilio