Reclaim Leisure // Digital Minimalism 07

“The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect . . . This life will also be the happiest.” -Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

As a teen, I played hours of video games with friends. Yet, when I catch up with those friends, we never reflect on the games. We talk about running together, camping trips, parties, and the time we built a bookshelf. There is something about leisure in the physical world that makes the experience more meaningful.

This articles explains why leisure is more important than ever and 4 practices for cultivating leisure from Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

The Good Life

Flow inducing activities have become a fascination in popular media. Flow is a concentrated state of bliss, like surfing the perfect wave. There are books about flow and centers to help you achieve this state. The beautiful thing about flow is that it is autotelic, it makes the activity enjoyable for its own sake, rather than a later goal. For more on flow, check out The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler.

Even the most ardent flow gurus, like Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, caution against becoming a “flow-junkie” racing from BASE jumping to surfing to rock climbing. They suggest scheduling flow experiences at regular intervals in your life.

To experience activity that is pleasant for its own sake and less risky, the answer is high quality leisure.

Most leisure in the 21st Century is mediated by screens and Silicon Valley tech behemoths, such as Facebook and Netflix. High quality leisure is set apart in the following three ways.

It’s Satisfying

When my high school buddies and I killed dozens of aliens in Halo, it felt good for a few minutes. When we won a relay race at a track meet the following weekend it made the kind of memory we still chat about.

Use the effort you put into an activity and the satisfaction you feel after as a compass that points to quality leisure.

Long before your iPad, humans were making stuff in three dimensions. Our brains are adapted to enjoy and excel at complex manual tasks, because it was necessary for survival.

Doing things in the physical world will still reward you with a pleasant neurochemical cocktail that is hard to match. Unfortunately, we can take shortcuts that impair our interaction with satisfying activities. For example, you could spend hours cooking an outstanding dinner for your friends and feel proud of your work and receive praise from people who care about you. However, it’s easier to snap a photo of yourself at a trendy new restaurant. The digital buzz of approval from your restaurant Instagram (*cough* cry for attention) post will give you a short high, but no satisfaction. In total, you missed an opportunity to do something of value.

Learn to spot the false satisfaction and pursue the stuff that lasts.

It’s Social

In my podcast, Dan Doty and I discussed how gratifying it is to bond with other men. Dan has led men of all ages on camping trips for several weeks at a time to guide them to a healthier and happier state of being.

When we converse with other people, with eye contact, tone, and body language, it is humanizing. There is joy in being heard and understood.

Many quality leisure activities have a social element that participants will pay a premium to experience. Look the revival of physical board games in a time when you can download a near-infinite number of free games to your phone in seconds.

The best example of the high value of social leisure may be CrossFit. A typical CrossFit box has simple equipment and modest facilities, but costs 10 times the price of your local gym. Why would anybody pay the difference? Because other human beings will be next you sweating, cheering, and guiding your exercise.

It is hard to overstate the value of physical exercise with real people in a world where most of us sit alone all day. Case in point: I’m sitting alone at home writing this article.

Prioritize leisure with analog social components.

It’s Accessible, But Not Instant

Technology can be used to your advantage when pursuing high quality leisure. As Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in an interview with Yuval Noah Harari, the internet has helped people create niche communities that gather in the physical world. For example, Zuck wasn’t into little league as a kid, but baseball was a standard activity for his generation. Now, if you’re into drawing Japanese cartoons, you can find other people with a similar interest and create a drawing group on Meetup.com that meets IRL.

The internet is also the best resource for learning many leisure activities. When I learned to play guitar, my friends taught me the basics, but I learned my favorite songs through tutorials on YouTube.

When using tech to enhance leisure, the key is to make the tech your tool. Find your community, instructions, or materials through the internet, then get to the activity in the physical world.

For specific practices to bring more leisure into your life, check out the list below from Digital Minimalism.

PRACTICES

1. Fix Or Build Something Every Week

Most people aren’t handy. It used to be valuable to know how to manage your home, fix your stuff, and mend your clothes. Changing economics made specialization more valuable. Now, it’s cost effective to hire out many handy tasks.

The thing about this practice is that financial efficiency is beside the point. Give yourself a chance to learn something new and master your domain. It could be as simple a sprucing up your home. If you don’t know where to start, YouTube is a tremendous resource for detailed tutorials.

2. Schedule Your Low-Quality Leisure

Your time is the currency of the attention economy conglomerates. Give your real life a chance by putting boundaries on your passive consumption of tweets, Netflix, blogs, etc.

Cal Newport explains that this practice works for two reasons. First, it protects your high quality time from the natural creep of low quality leisure. Second, it allows you to keep the low quality activities you value rather than trying to abandon them.

When you implement this practice, you may find that you can make a significant cut in the time spent on low quality activities. Scheduling email helped me reduce the time spent on it by an hour per week. That’s 52 hours per year that I get to put to better use.

3. Join Something

Join an organization that puts you in touch with real people, then work out the details. You can craft most activities to suit you with time.

Whether it’s Toastmasters, local sports, a church group, or a Meetup.com group, there’s a place for you.

4. Follow Leisure Plans

Making a leisure plan with some goals (e.g. learning basic tango before the end of the year) will keep your leisure time on track. So, set a clear goal, then craft a habit of the pursuit of that goal.

As scheduling your low quality leisure time kept it from growing, scheduling your high quality leisure will keep it from shrinking.

Systems, calendars, and deadlines will all serve your leisure plan. So, be sure to put it in your planner and tell someone about it to keep you accountable.

All of this may sound too serious for leisure. Why not be relaxed and schedule some chill time? The truth is that taking it easy is overrated and often turns into low quality leisure. The gravitational pull of the attention economy has already made “Netflix” and “chill” one concept, “Netflix ’n’ chill.”

For more, read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.