Filling Your Free Time With Meaning Might Be the Key to Well-Being and Success
How to use the ancient concept of Noble Leisure to find happiness, fulfillment, and yes, even productivity
“That is the principal point: with what kind of activity is man to occupy his leisure?”
— Aristotle
Athens, Greece, around 330 BC. Aristotle is hard at work at the Lyceum, the location of the Peripatetic school of philosophy he founded. He is deep in thought and discussion about logic, metaphysics, mathematics, biology, botany, ethics, and politics.
But what we might today classify as knowledge work, was largely leisure to Aristotle.
And not just any form of leisure. It was noble leisure.
A kind of leisure that — very different from zoning out in front of Netflix or endlessly swiping on Instagram — put him in a state of effortless flow and filled his life with a deep sense of meaning.
When we think of leisure, we often associate it with rest and relaxation.
It’s the stuff that happens in the time that’s left between work and all our other obligations.
But to Aristotle, leisure and rest couldn’t have been more different. And leisure certainly wasn’t something to simply fill empty time slots with.
Rest, in the way he defined it, always asks the question “rest from what?” (with the answer often being “to do more work!”).
In Aristotle’s hierarchy, we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. But leisure is defined entirely through itself. It stands at the top of the hierarchy.
Work is done for a purpose, a utilitarian goal. Leisure, on the other hand, is done purely for its own sake, in search of meaning.
And meaning might just be what we all need a bit more of in our lives right now.
“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”
— Viktor Frankl
Our culture puts a big focus on the pursuit of happiness.
But ancient wisdom, as well as a growing body of modern research, point to a different path to sustainable well-being: a pursuit of meaning.
Deloitte’s chief well-being officer Jen Fisher recently discussed this on her podcast WorkWell with Emily Esfahani Smith, the author of The Power of Meaning.
In the interview, Esfahani Smith notes that:
“What predicts this rising tide of misery isn’t a lack of happiness in people’s lives, but lack of meaning. […] Meaning is what we should be focusing on even though our culture is pushing us so much towards happiness.”
She also stresses that meaning is often found in pursuits that are hard. But it’s exactly because they are hard that they fill us with a sense of purpose and meaning.
“While happiness comes and goes, meaning is something that lasts.”
— Emily Esfahani Smith
True leisure, noble leisure, is far from passivity or relaxation.
It is an activity in which we can find our greatest fulfillment as humans.
Rather than mindlessly filling our free time with distracting pastimes — in the literal sense of the word — we actually put our undivided attention and full energy behind something we deeply care about.
The more energy we put into this kind of activity, the more energized we feel.
This is the power of noble leisure.
Think of the times you volunteered in your community, cooked an elaborate meal for your friends and family, or worked on your art for hours on end.
These activities are all far from easy. To some people, they might even look like work. But if you care about them, they leave you with a glow, a twinkling in your eyes, and ultimately a wellspring of energy and a deep sense of meaning.
And this form of leisure is not only a great source of well-being. Somewhat paradoxically, noble leisure is also a key to productivity — if we are willing to expand our definition of productivity beyond our modern obsession with busyness.
While today we might think of Aristotle’s pursuits as “work,” to him they were largely leisure. Most of his thoughts were pure contemplation, which he considered as an “activity that is appreciated for its own sake… Nothing is gained from it except the act of contemplation.”
Unfortunately, even among the most “pure” knowledge workers today, such as academics, this form of thinking removed from purpose rarely exists anymore.
We no longer understand the concept of noble leisure — and this has a huge impact on our lives, both at the individual level and as a society.
Paraphrasing Aristotle, if we are always too busy with work, or are given over to pure relaxation to recover for more work, we have neither the time nor inspiration to live virtuous lives and contribute to society and culture.
We become a society without leisure.
And without leisure, we become a society without big ideas.
In his wonderful and still very timely essay In Praise of Idleness, philosopher and polymath Bertrand Russell noted that it was leisure that allowed us to accomplish many of the things we now consider the biggest achievements of civilization.
For most of human history, it was the leisure class that “contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. […] Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.”
Today, more and more of us are able to join the leisure class. But we have lost track of the main point — we have confused the roles of work and leisure, and started equating the latter with laziness and sloth.
But we need noble leisure more than ever.
To tackle the many challenges, big and small, that humanity is facing, we need deep thinkers, playful creatives, and empathetic leaders.
We need people who practice noble leisure.
Genuinely productive knowledge work is the opposite of busyness and requires a harder, more thoughtful approach. It requires taking time off seriously. In addition to a solid work ethic, it requires an equally well-established rest ethic.
It’s time to re-learn productivity in the ancient sense, which puts a focus on culture and the simple joy of life just as much, if not more, than it does on sheer economy—productivity that fills our lives with meaning, rather than productivity for the sake of being “productive.”
If we are able to make this shift, we can create a culture in which productivity and well-being go hand in hand. A culture of creative, scientific, spiritual, and humanitarian progress.
A culture of noble leisure.
“One should act with a view to what is necessary and useful, but, more so, with a view to what is noble,”
Aristotle reminds us.
“Nature itself aims not only at the correct use of work but also at the capacity for noble leisured activity. Since such activity equates to flourishing, it is the starting point for everything else.”
Think for a moment: what activities bring you the most fulfillment outside of work? What activities make you feel like you are flourishing? Have you been giving them enough time and attention?
Personally, by far the most meaningful project I have been involved in this year, probably in my entire life, is the book Time Off I co-wrote and published this year.
Writing a book is hard work. But for me, it was noble leisure in its purest form.
The more energy I put into it, the more I got back. I could effortlessly find myself in a flow state, completely forgetting about everything else, almost every time I sat down to work on the book. I deeply cared about sharing this message, and it filled me with a strong sense of purpose and meaning.
That is not to say that noble leisure should always be a big project like this.
I think many of us — millennials in particular — have this misguided urge to turn every hobby into a side hustle (and I have certainly been guilty of this myself). But we have to be careful. Something that’s “just” a hobby, that’s purely done for its own sake, is much closer to the original definition of noble leisure.
I believe that it is possible to keep being guided by a sense of meaning rather than money if you turn something into a business, but it’s more difficult not to dilute the meaning or entirely lose it along the way.
And noble leisure is not a singular thing. Besides the book, I have many other activities that I consider noble leisure. The most recurring among them being long hikes in nature, making music, and baking bread.
What exactly noble leisure looks like has to be discovered by each of us individually. My noble leisure might look like work to you, and vice versa.
Finding your own noble leisure starts with awareness and introspection.
So the next time you take some time off, ask yourself the following question: am I merely resting, or am I celebrating noble leisure?