The average life is now, in France as in Quebec, more than 80 years, made up of thousands of days and hours. What are we going to do with this “ocean of time”?
Buried under work, stuck in transportation, moving from one screen to another, how do we get rid of the remaining time, what we call free time? Many of us still waste it in front of screens, agreeing to be the algorithmic and content slaves to the exponential growth of digital platforms.
“We stole our time,” notes Olivier Babu V entertainment tyrannywhich is the article he devoted to the phenomenon, which is intended as a “disturbing warning of a problem no one wants to see”.
Because between the tireless leisure of the ancients and the search for immediate pleasure through leisure, it seems to the essayist that we live in an era “sick with leisure.”
“I’m not criticizing entertainment per se, I’m criticizing tyranny,” explains Olivier Pappeau, 47, a liberal economist, professor at Purdue University and co-founder in 2017 of the Sabines Institute, an ideas lab. “It’s actually a matter of balance. We all need, from time to time, to relax, do something else, let loose. The problem is when we spend all our free time there.”
Today we live in a civilization of leisure, recalls the person who in 2009 was a brief adviser to Prime Minister François Fillon, in a few decades the decline in working time was rapid. And so we, without really realizing it, entered a world where work no longer held the primary place.
It’s really a balance issue. We all need, from time to time, to unwind, do something else, and let loose.
Good use of freedom
“Freedom in itself is a good thing, of course. But we refuse to imagine that there can unfortunately be bad uses of free time. In other words: there is work that is repulsive, but leisure is not necessarily liberating. It can also be repulsive.”
Olivier Pappeau presents this book as a logical continuation of his previous article, The new digital chaos (Buchet-Chastel, 2020), where it was about the polarization of the world – social, economic and even democratic – in the digital age. It also feeds on a more personal dimension, linked to the death just over two years ago of his father, an intellectual and economics professor who died at the age of 86 at his desk, writing his last essay.
“My dad was lucky because he didn’t have a craft, but rather a profession, as does mine. There is something he’s done all his life, that has been coexisting with his identity and his way of life,” he says.
if in entertainment tyranny He begins by revealing a panoramic history of work and leisure, not hesitating to question the way in which he himself, today, conveys leisure to his children. He believes “because free time is essential”. This is where social differences are made. And this is also where the truth of our life is revealed, in fact, from beginning to end. »
Leisure time is a time for oneself, free time, recalls Olivier Babu, who distinguishes between three types of use of leisure time. First, there is time for others, social, family, or friends. Then there is time for itself, what I call it Skool diligent entertainer. It’s all the time you’ll be active, growing and empowering yourself. For example through reading, sports, reflection and meditation. All the times when you intend to increase yourself, if you will, grow yourself. »
He goes on to say that the latter type is leisure time that is “outside itself”, negative, that which diminishes your capacity. “It is an activity that takes you away from yourself, that envelops you. It is the scroll Which makes you lose three-quarters of an hour of your life, because you jumped from one video to the next. This is what the word “entertainment” covers, which, as the writer realizes, has a power of attraction that the other two do not have.
“We always think a lot about work and in relation to it, but it occupies a fairly small place in our lives. And I think that social differences mix in other places. First in front of work, in studies. And I always tell my students at the beginning of the year that the difference between them when they work later in a company will be in what they did alongside their studies.”
New technologies, harmful effects
There is no doubt, according to him, that new technologies, through a series of harmful effects, increase the tragedy of free time. Rightly defending himself from preaching, the right-wing economist in his article doubles down on precautions so as not to appear reactionary.
Thus, the issue is not about putting pleasure at a distance because pleasure will be bad. He defends the Greek, or ancient, approach that pleasure is good if it is disciplined, and thus provides us with the highest quality of pleasure.
It is Michel Foucault’s idea Self care. Essentially, pleasure is a super-servant, but a bad master. By the way, like money. You have to know how to tame it. Sometimes it takes self-discipline. For example, when you are working on a musical instrument, it may take several years of effort to reach absolutely incredible pleasure. »
In the same way, eating only sweets or eating a lot of them does not enhance our well-being. He believes we should develop the same discipline towards screens. Basically, there is only one choice: resist or surrender.
Free, we are our greatest enemies, wrote Olivier Pappeau. The wealthy society that has become ours, in which everything seems designed to spare the individual the slightest effort – including the effort to think, with the recent and wonderful breakthroughs of artificial intelligence – is now an order of urgency to resist the ‘easiness trap’. And we begin to resist the self.
“It’s a very difficult freedom,” notes the essayist, who recalls that people in the past never chose anything in their lives. “You have in your pocket, today permanently, an infinite number of content planned to be most attractive to you. The ones that suit you. What strength do I have to say: I will pick up a book, make something or even daydream! It is very difficult to resist this temptation. We all have this problem.”
But Olivier Paabou, who himself admits to suffering from a certain addiction, believes it is important not to demonize screens. It is above all a question of balance, a condition that can be achieved by setting small rules.
We need to develop a user manual that is not delivered with the techniques. “Realizing that is the most important thing.”
