EOC Part B Work and Leisure

Source A 

From  “Money, Leisure, Death: What College Students Should Be Learning About” by Paula Marantz Cohen (The American Scholar, October 9, 2012) 

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Three subjects that are fundamental to leading an examined life go unaddressed in the college curriculum: money, leisure, and death. ... 

Money, you will say, is already taught in college. ... But Iam speaking about money in personal and philosophical ways. ... 

This means thinking about money in a larger context: How important is it to you, and how much of it do you need to lead the life you want? Tolstoy addresses these questions cogently in his short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” In it, a peasant farmer is told that he can own as much land as he can encircle in a day. The man sets his sights high, pushing himself to run around a very large space, and when he finishes, drops dead.

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 The story asks what really has value not just from day to day, but over time. ...

Leisure connects to money, because how we spend our time depends on how much money we need. Some of my students say that they plan to work very hard at well-paying but unsatisfying jobs for a number of years to earn the money they need to retire early. Others say that they won’t mind working long, tedious hours if they get adequate vacation time. ... 

These students need to be encouraged to think about the value of an integrated life, to imagine returning from a luxury vacation to a job they hate. Or to have a job that never really allows for time off.

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We all know people who, even on vacation, are continually on their smart phones, responding to messages.  They  have deleted leisure from their experience. ...

Understanding how certain leisure activities yield more pleasure over time might also be part of the course. ...

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It is possible to learn to get pleasure from simpler [things, many of which] can be done alone and pursued into old age. Students should be encouraged to ...cultivate at least a few of these simple pleasures. ..

Death supplies the context for thinking deeply about money and leisure. I find it strange...to see how many students have never considered the simple fact that they will eventually die.... 

Thinking about mortality is humbling; it opens us more fully to the richness of life when we are aware of how fleeting our time on earth is. The prospect of death can help us to see more clearly how we want to spend our lives. 

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. . . [C]ollege is meant to be a preparation for life as they will live it, and so these subjects are crucial to a good education. 

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Source B 

From Adam Bede by George Eliot (1859) 

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Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from “afternoon church.”... Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure.* 

* a position or office that requires little or no work but provides income or status 

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Source C 

From “Why Are Americans So Afraid of Vacation?” by Christopher Muther (The Boston Globe, April 1, 2016) Over the past five years Briana Volk and her husband Andrew opened a popular cocktail bar in Portland, Maine, had a baby, and Briana launched her own marketing business. Despite all they achieved, there was one task the couple never found time to complete—take a vacation.... 

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If their vacation skipping tale sounds familiar, it’s because the Volks represent an unfortunate and unending trend. Americans not only get less vacation than many of their European counterparts, but, even worse, they’re not taking all the days they earn. 

In short, we are a nation of vacation-deprived, work-obsessed, business casual-attired zombies. 

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“A lot of employees say their company’s culture actually frowns on taking time off,” said Dr. David Ballard, director of the American Psychological Association’s Center of Organizational Excellence. “The US was founded on a strong work ethic. We often put our own balance and well-being aside and cave into that feeling of wanting to be productive and needing to perform.”... 

[A] study by Oxford Economics, an economics analysis firm, found that Americans are throwing away $52.4 billion in earned vacation benefits each year. [Oxford also found that Americans forfeit five vacation days a year.]...

 According to Project: Time Off [a travel-industry-funded organization that researches vacation habits], the primary reason Americans don’t take vacation is that they fear coming back to a Mount Fuji-size pile of work when they return to the office. Other workers surveyed said they skip because they fear no one else can do their job, they can’t afford a vacation, taking time off could get in the way of a promotion, or they want to show dedication to their company.... 

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As vacations have gotten shorter, the work week has gotten longer. A Gallup poll from 2014 found that Americans work an average of 47 hours a week. Even when they take vacation, 61 percent of Americans still work, despite complaints from family members, and 25 percent report being contacted by a colleague with a work-related question while on vacation, according to a survey from the employment website Glassdoor....

 . . . The all-work-no-play mentality may help with appearances in the office, but it’s not helping much else. 

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“Fatigue sets in, rigidity applies, and all creativity and innovation are lost—both of which need time away for other activities to increase the probability of new ideas,” said Lotte Bailyn, an MIT researcher.... The more vacation you take, the less stressed you’ll feel.... 

According to Ellen Galinsky, president of the [Families and Work] Institute, those who take longer vacations showed fewer signs of depression. She was also quick to point out that more vacation results in better family relationships. 

“I did a study called ‘Ask the Children,’ where I asked kids about the impact of their mother’s and father’s work on their lives,” Galinsky said. “Their one wish was not necessarily to have more time with their parents, but that their parents would be less stressed and less tired.”... 

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Vacation skipping is a topic that’s often swept under the keyboard. 

“If you see people you admire most in your organization taking, loving, and talking about having a wonderful  time  on their vacations, that’s an important step toward changing the culture.”... 

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“We’re not machines,” said Galinsky. “Think of working e very day as running a marathon or weight lifting.  We need time for rest and recovery. Even machines break down under pressure.” 

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Source D

From “The Spirit of Capitalism,” The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (1930) 

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should “money be made out of men,” Benjamin Franklin himself...answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (Prov. 22:29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling....

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And in truth this peculiar idea, so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one’s duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital). 

Of course, this conception has not appeared only under capitalistic conditions. On the contrary, we shall later trace its origins back to a time previous to the advent of capitalism. Still less, naturally, do we maintain that a conscious acceptance of these ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or labourers, in modern capitalistic enterprises, is a condition of the further existence of present-day capitalism. The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. 

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Thus the capitalism of to-day, which has come to dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest.