Leisurely Labor, Laborious Leisure

It’s May Day! The day before my birthday! The pagan fertility holiday! International Workers’ Day! And as I draw (sort of) nearer to the end of my career as a graduate student, I have been exploring career options, soul searching, and imagining what my life might be like  when my doctoral degree is proverbially in hand (but really hanging on my wall). In short, I have been thinking about labor: What is it? How is it compensated? What “counts” as legitimate labor in the world I inhabit? I have more or less decided that I do not want to follow in the footsteps of Professor X, but am still uncertain about what kind of labor I would like to engage in, or what I want to be when I grow up.

Labor: The word implies difficult work, putting a great deal of effort into something. But it is also the term for the process of child birth, suggesting that while labor is difficult and even painful, it is also productive, vital.

The carpenter labors. We know, because we can see the house he has built. We hear him driving nails, see his back bend beneath the weight of boards and bricks. We can quantify his work, and reimburse him with a paycheck. We understand the labor that others do by the products they create and through our imaginative empathy for their efforts. When we benefit from someone else’s labor, are we not grateful? Within that very sentiment, we acknowledge and affirm our own belief that labor is the not-fun, not-pleasant enemy of leisure. But are we right to do so?

Leisure: Free time, in the sense of being both unoccupied and unpaid. What we do at our leisure, we do for our own enjoyment, for the pleasure it brings us. These activities are their own reward, or so we are told.

But labor and leisure are a false dichotomy that is based on the way that others compensate us for our time. What if I write a magazine article, and I put a great deal of effort or labor into it, but I also enjoy that effort? Maybe the story I craft becomes a blueprint of narrative in my reader’s imagination. Perhaps I select and join my words in such a way that they are like irregular stones which are cemented together, forming a firm foundation upon which a literary image can be built. If I do this for free (like I do in this blog), is this a laborious leisure activity? If I get paid to write the article, is it leisurely labor? This blog: what is it? If you read it, and you gain some pleasure or insight from the text, are you not glad that you have read it? Are you not also grateful (as you would be to the carpenter) that you did not have to do the writing (or building) yourself?