On Work, Rest, and the Things That Make Life Worth Living
Talking Big Ideas.
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a while, including you.”
~ Anne Lamott
As a boy, Richard Rorty thought he figured out the meaning of life.
“I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting for social justice,” he later wrote.
His parents were committed adherents of Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary theorist who believed that political struggle must be continuous and never allowed to settle. Trotsky called it permanent revolution. Rorty was nine years old when Trotsky was assassinated, and one of his key secretaries went into hiding – in Rorty’s house.
A close friend of Rorty’s parents, the anarchist labor organizer Carlo Tresca, was later shot to death on a street in New York City.
Rorty grew up surrounded by people for whom ideas were not abstractions but commitments that could cost you your life. Yet he loved doing “weird” things, like hiking through the mountains and searching for wild orchids.
The moral world Rorty inherited had little patience for such time-wasting activities. What did pretty flowers have to do with permanent revolution? Childhood certainty gave way to adolescent doubt. Rorty wanted to live up to Trotskyism, but he sensed there was more inside him than that:
“I wanted a way to be both . . . a nerd recluse and a fighter for justice. I was very confused.”
Rorty would eventually become a major 20th-century philosopher. He wrote perhaps his most classic essay, Trotsky and the Wild Orchids, examining this tension.
We all feel it.
The push to keep working on projects. The guilt for basking in leisure. The pressure to conform.
Oliver Burkeman argues in his book Four Thousand Weeks that we spend our time in two distinct ways: telic and atelic.
Telic activities have an aim. We do them to improve something, to arrive at an enhanced future state. For example, practicing an upcoming speech or taking to the streets to fight for justice.
Notice the pressure to spend even your holidays in a telic state – learning a new recipe, planning New Year’s goals, stressing over unfinished work.
Our focus with telic activities is in the future. It’s easy to tell ourselves that once all our projects are done, once we’ve got all the results we want, we can relax and be present.
Except projects and desires are endless.
We never reach the magic moment when everything is in its proper place. If we don’t intentionally pause and step away, our entire lives will be spent sacrificing today for a tomorrow that may never come.
Meaningful life is filled with atelic activities.
They have no aim. We simply enjoy them as experiences, like throwing a ball in the backyard with our kids or strolling through nature to look at pretty flowers.
The most fulfilling atelic pleasures are often shared with others – getting together over the holidays, playing games, laughing, singing. Doing nothing, together. The average person lives just 4,000 weeks, so our time is more limited than it seems. How should we spend it? Burkeman writes:
The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder . . . we yearn for more meaning, yet rarely get around to doing the meaningful things.
My 16-month-old son, Pearson, keeps pulling me back to the present.
I’ll be lost in a work problem, replaying a conversation, or thinking ahead to what’s next, when I look at him and realize he’s already here.
On Friday, we went to our local gymnastics studio for toddler play hour. We walked a plank together and jumped into a foam pit. I tossed Pearson into the air, and he landed laughing, over and over, as if nothing else in the world existed.
In his magnum opus, History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote:
The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.
Consider the blind forces pushing you right now to focus on the future instead of the present. The stress you may feel to complete a project. The desire to do one more task to advance the mission.
Permit yourself to pause.
This final week of the year, let’s step away from the firehose. Let’s resist the urge to slog. Let’s enjoy being with loved ones for its own sake.
Make time for your wild orchids – and make room for theirs.
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I published an earlier version of this piece on 20 December 2024.
