ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, July 12, 2007

Lost amid iPods and laptops: the art of leisure
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

I swore I wouldn't do it again, but there I was: hunkered down at a computer
keyboard under the dreary fluorescent lights of the hotel's business center. It
was a perfect spring day in Honolulu and I should have been strolling Waikiki
Beach with my husband. Instead I was working, racing to meet one more deadline
before enjoying our long-awaited vacation.

I pled my case to my husband later that day: It was an unusual circumstance, I
said, a project that could not wait until we returned to St. Louis.

Actually, it was not too unusual. Whether lugging my laptop around New Orleans
or darting into Internet cafes from Portland to Portugal to check e-mail, I
have a habit of mixing business and pleasure.

I am not alone. An AP/Ipsos poll released last month found that one in five
Americans brought a laptop on his most recent vacation. Another one-fifth
worked during vacation, and about the same number checked office messages or
called to see how things were going at the office. About 40 percent checked
e-mail.

That's just among those who took vacations. A Center for Economic and Policy
Research study estimates one quarter of American workers receive no paid
vacation, and a survey commissioned by Expedia.com found that more than a third
of those who receive vacation days will not use all of them this year.

Our strong work ethic and our demanding schedules fuel our prosperity, but they
can breed burnout. We live in an age in which corporations dispatch "vacation
police" to shoo employees from the office, Workaholics Anonymous meetings
attract nurses and construction workers as well as CEOs and summer vacations
for schoolchildren are shrinking from three months to two. Leisure is becoming
a lost art.

Our success is partly to blame. Technological advances that streamline our
housework and allow us to telecommute also keep us tethered to work. We are
accessible anytime, anywhere, and we cannot escape work's demands.

We still try, of course — often relying on the very technology that feeds our
work addiction. Television occupies about half of our leisure time. We use
waterproof radios in the shower, DVDs in the car and iPods on the plane —
anything to distract from the daily grind. Lured into a produce-and-consume
cycle, we work harder to buy more toys to relieve the stress of our mounting
workloads.

Such escapism falls far short of the leisure ideal praised by philosophers
through the ages. As Josef Pieper argued in his 1952 book, "Leisure: The Basis
of Culture," true leisure is not idleness or distraction but "an inner absence
of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet." We do not
cultivate this "condition of soul," Pieper wrote, by acquiring gadgets or
venturing to exotic locales; we achieve it by allowing ourselves the time,
space and quiet to enjoy simple pleasures and ponder the purpose behind our
striving.

Genuine leisure reminds us that we are more than our jobs. As Pieper said, ". .
. the ability to be 'at leisure' is one of the basic powers of the human soul.
. . . [It] is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with
those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again,
into the busy world of work."

Pieper's ideas have begun to transform my view of leisure from a guilty
pleasure to a serious priority. I haven't finished his book yet — work has been
busy — but I plan to pack it on my next vacation.

There should be plenty of room. I'm leaving the laptop home.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.