Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Author:Oliver Burkeman [Burkeman, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

9.

Rediscovering Rest

One boiling summer weekend a few years ago, I joined the impassioned members of a campaigning group called Take Back Your Time in an airless university lecture theater in Seattle, where they’d assembled to further their long-standing mission of “eliminating the epidemic of overwork.” The gathering in which I participated, their annual conference, was a sparsely attended affair—in part because, as the organizers conceded, it was August, and lots of people were on vacation, and America’s most stridently pro-relaxation organization could hardly complain about that. But it was also because Take Back Your Time promotes what counts, these days, as a highly subversive message. There’s nothing unusual about its demands for more days off or shorter working hours; such proposals are increasingly common. But they are almost always justified on the grounds that a well-rested worker is a more productive worker—and it was precisely this rationale that the group had been set up to question. Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? “You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventyish filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense!” Later, I learned about the existence of a rival initiative, Project: Time Off, which, unlike Take Back Your Time, enjoyed generous corporate sponsorship, and better-attended conferences—and it was no surprise to learn that its mission was to promote “the personal, business, social and economic benefits” of leisure. It was also backed by the US Travel Association, which has its own reasons for wanting people to take more vacations.

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