Slow down. Work harder.

We preach both messages to Christians today.

Depending on the weather, I will sometimes take the bus to work in the morning. It’s about a 40-minute trip. You tell people that, and sometimes they have this, “you could be so productive!”, imagining me opening a laptop or grading papers or something. And you could do that. But almost all of the time, I just look out the window and let my mind think about things. I don’t have a plan. I don’t write things down. Thoughts I have, and observations I make, do sometimes appear in class later. But I just look out the window and think. Some people intentionally meditate, I do not, but I suspect the time offers a similar sort of calming and centering your soul benefit. It is rather central to this post whether or not that seems like a “waste of time” to you.

As I wrote about last June, the final talk at the Association of Classical Christian Schools conference this year was by David Bahsen, a talk about the importance of work. Work is good. You were created with the intention that you would work. Bahsen even ridiculed the idea of “work-life balance” because life is supposed to be about work, that’s a false separation, he said. It was a well-received talk, I think most of our teachers said it was their favorite of the conference (though I think there is a bias in the last talk also being the most remembered). I didn’t entirely disagree. Adam, let us notice, had work to do before the Fall. A fair number of Americans, I think, have this idea that the goal is to make enough money so you don’t have to work, so your life can then be a perpetual vacation. Scripture nowhere suggests that this should be your goal. And, it’s worth noticing, people who actually have made that much money, keep working anyway. It’s programmed into us that a life of constant vacations is a wasted life.

But I had reservations about the talk too. For one, you chuckle to think that every abusive employer in America would love to send their employees to a talk ridiculing the idea of work-life balance, telling them life is supposed to be about work, and have everyone cheer at the end. Amen! Say it again! But I also said, back in June, that Bahnsen just didn’t consider that the way most of us work now would have seemed odd to many of our ancestors - separating spouses and children all day long, in particular, and working in obedience to the clock. “Work-from-home” can certainly be abused (94% of federal employees now work from home at least part of the time - do you think they’re all actually working?), but I have hopes that it could actually help restore what, historically, was a common working environment.

I can’t find it now, but a while back, there was a viral Twitter thread (which I did share and discuss in class) along the lines of, the rising generation (think of a 22-year-old out for their first big job) are commonly said to be lazy, why they’ll even ask about things like work-life balance in the job interview! They’re trying to minimize their work, while looking for work! But, the author of this thread said - no, they’re smart. They realized, or were advised, by age 22, what it takes a lot of people until age 40 to figure out - especially that, if you don’t ask about or set boundaries, there are plenty of employers that will consciously or unconsciously take advantage of you (especially if you’re a productive and moral person - we all know that the better you work, the more work you get). Good for this generation for having the presence of mind to ask about limits from day one.

Leisure and slowing down

Over Christmas we stayed with my sister, who sort of put this whole post into my head. She had just finished reading Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy by Matthew Kelly, and gave the book to me. Now, it’s kind of a fluffy Christian self-help book, so I don’t particularly recommend the book as a book… but the overall message is valuable and, I suspect, a message modern Christians need to hear more than “work harder”¹. And actually, a scenario my sister brought up with me was almost the one that began this post - how many Americans would want to, or could, just sit there at peace with themselves for a while? And, both she and Kelly suggested, a lot of the craziness in America today is connected to the fact that we don’t do that. Keeping ourselves oriented toward the good and appropriate and best things in life requires peaceful times in life, requires times of contemplation. Everything now is noise and activity and so we just get carried along by the waves. (My forever-comment that adding a television to your restaurant is not a perk, it’s an annoyance… we may give sports bars and only sports bars an exception.) We probably all know one of Pascal’s more famous quotations.

(And indeed, lest we think this is only a modern concern - Pascal died long before industrialization and the internet.)

For example, Kelly suggests - do you want to kill religion? As I’ve said before, arguments are dangerous, they activate the rational part of your opponents brain and you may well lose the case. So just keep people busy all the time, you’ll do it without having to make an argument.

One of the ways Communism seeks to murder religion is through “total work.” Total work transforms human beings into workers and nothing more.

The totalitarianism of Communism is a dictatorship and requires complete subservience to the state. Total work is a form of totalitarianism where complete subservience to work is required. Total work is a condition in society that establishes work as the dominant focus of human life, work as people’s source of identity, and it is work that consumes every aspect of life.

Total work makes wisdom, culture, religion, and contemplating God impossible. This is why total work was so central to Communism in the twentieth century. In our own place and time, we are imposing the condition of total work upon ourselves.

This whole section is sourced upon comments Roman Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, whom I know some of you love, made in Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

Peiper points out that religion can only be authentically born in a person and society through leisure. It cannot be rushed. Leisure is indispensable for the contemplation of God. Leisure is the foundation of culture.

It was just a coincidence, as this post was already in my mind, that Twitter exploded with a discussion, originally about how many foreign workers should be permitted into the US, that also became a discussion about how much we should be working, indeed about whether “productivity” and “efficiency” are the measures that should be applied to a person or a potential worker or a society. A few people were bragging about working 80 hours a week². There may be seasons of life when you should be working for 80 hours a week, I don’t want to dispute that, I don’t know your circumstances if that is you right now. But if that is your normal and expected to continue indefinitely, and especially if that work takes you away from family… that’s probably not good. You shouldn’t be bragging about your productivity, you should be wondering if your priorities are messed up, or how you can escape that situation.

From “CrownMaybe”, replying to a now-deleted tweet (I wonder what it said).

From “Oldest Sleep”, not even thinking about 80 hours.

I read something like that and do feel obliged to say again… I suspect it isn’t just the amount of work (say, time spent) that really kills people, but how the work is done. “Get your butt into the cubicle from 9-5 every Monday-Friday, away from your spouse and family, with almost no exceptions” kills people. That sort of work makes it impossible for people to order their lives around the rhythms of nature, holidays, and family, because they are servants to the scientific never-pausing clock that doesn’t know about any of those things. That same time spent in a more flexible way might not feel the same burden.

On a related note, back to Kelly:

The human efficiency movement grew out of witnessing the efficiency of machines. This gave birth to a desire for people to behave more like machines, but they knew people would reject such blatant dehumanization. So they called it efficiency, and they made us compete with each other to be the best at is. So, it is easy to see how we developed a distorted view of leisure.

A comment Kelly made elsewhere that hit me was, if someone actually had a day of leisure, and you ask them what they did today… they feel obliged to make stuff up. They feel obliged to make it sound like they were busy (I’ve certainly felt that pressure before). We shouldn’t feel that pressure. Certainly at least one day a week, taking a break from our work is a good thing, God said so rather explicitly.

There are probably implications for Christian employers in this, but I can’t spell them out for you, they will certainly depend upon circumstance. But, for example, Kelly makes the point that in academia, it is still decently common to give people a sabbatical. Work for seven years (or some other number), then you get a year “off”. Now, let’s not misinterpret this, this is not usually “just take a one year vacation at our expense”. But it is something like “you set your own schedule for a year, travel, take a break, while also doing the sort of work for your profession that can only be done with a year of focused effort”. So maybe at the end of it you’ve written a book instead of teaching classes. It isn’t a vacation - but it is a sort of time of extended leisure. Should such things be more common? I can’t answer that question for you.

The summary

Slow down. Work harder. Both these messages have value. Adam was given work to do before the Fall. You will have work to do on the new Earth. Work is good. The goal of life is not to find some way to escape all work.

But life needs a rhythm with breaks, and leisure, and times of quiet contemplation, so we can keep ourselves oriented toward the things that matter most. And I suspect most American Christians need to hear that message more.

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1. I don’t want to dwell on this, but in parts, Kelly is at least linguistically contradictory to Bahsen. Kelly says “you don’t live to work, you work to live”. Bahsen would absolutely say that you live to work. But they are using “work” in slightly different ways at least, see next footnote.

2. I’m afraid this whole section suffers a bit from ambiguity in what we mean by the English word “work”. Bahsen would have been very clear that, say, a stay-at-home mom caring for her children is working. When people brag about working 80-hours-a-week they almost always mean at the office or factory floor, not about the treehouse they built for their kids in the backyard. Sorry for the ambiguity that is already baked into our English language here.