True Leisure and the Tyranny of Total Work

The famous Robert Frost poem—about taking the road less traveled—hits differently at my age. In my mid-thirties, I find myself wondering whether Frost had to grieve the loss of the road he didn’t take—not because he made the wrong choice, but simply because he had to make a choice at all.

When I was younger, I thought I had time for everything. Even if I knew logically that I wouldn’t, the perspective of my youth didn’t contain the true weight of mortality. Now I know better. We don’t have time to do it all.

Although it’s one of the most fundamental problems of human existence, it’s natural to fear death and try to distract ourselves from thinking about it. There’s no shortage of tools to help redirect our attention. In my coaching practice, I’ve found that one of the most insidious drugs of choice is also one of the more socially acceptable ones: work.

Work is productive. Work puts food on the table. Work is virtuous. While societal narratives recognize that compulsive working is unhealthy—hence the term “workaholism”—your relationship to work has to deteriorate to quite an extent before such protective mechanisms kick in. The culture encourages and rewards unhealthy attitudes towards work.

Let’s dive deeper into how people use work to avoid facing mortality, society reinforces that avoidance, and the structure of modern-day work creates a bind that can be difficult to escape.

What happens when leisure ceases to exist?

The combination of the fear of finitude and perception of work as virtuous gives rise to a phenomenon called total work, which was coined by German philosopher Josef Pieper. Total work is a state of being where work is the central and defining focus of life. Put another way, total work is what happens when leisure ceases to exist. 

According to Pieper, leisure is the capacity to “just be” without the need for distraction. Consider what happens when you have nothing in particular to occupy your attention. Often, it’s in these moments that you find challenging feelings becoming more salient in your awareness. This is the loop that keeps driving so many of us back to distraction.