The Temple of Leisure

I was on the slopes the other day, the first time in nearly two decades that I had clipped on a pair of skis. I went to Whistler-Blackcomb, the vaunted ski resort and Vancouver's trump card in a 2010 Winter Olympics bid that has the city feeling its oats. Since I'm writing this now, I survived, and I might likely ski again, but one of the things I noted was how costly it all was, even with discounts and my thrifty nature. A lift ticket in the area of seventy-five dollars, a set of rental equipment for thirty, transportation up to the mountain and food and drink while there (nine dollars for a bowl of chili!), and it all added up to a fine dent in the wallet. No wonder people have always thought of skiing as one of the provinces of the rich and well-to-do.

Recently, too, I cancelled my membership at the local aquatic centre. I hadn't been swimming as much, and though it was relatively inexpensive, I still felt strange paying for leisure and exercise I would never use. It made me think of all those private gyms that people go to, determined and humourless in their pursuit of weight loss and fitness, and all the money spent to make use of them (or not, depending on their diligence). The way these annual memberships and season passes are structured, it forces a person into a mentality that requires them to maximize their usage of the services they've pre-paid for, to the point where it becomes akin to chore.

The Economist, earlier this year, began publishing a lifestyle magazine called Intelligent Life in whose inaugural issue they profiled the sport of leisure boxing -- people of white-collar background who felt that they weren't getting enough out of their pansy, low-impact workout, and so chose to pay for the benefit of the highest impact workout around. The magazine's sections, ranging from the explicitly consumerist "Wealth" and "Luxury" categories to the implicated-by-association "Leisure" and "Travel" headings, are all about what people do when they have money and few native ideas on how to spend it.

It's hard to tell whether or not this is a good thing -- is the slow creep of the "wealth instinct" to the middle-class a sign of rising, global prosperity? I have my doubts. People have been rich since time immemorial, and conspicuous consumption has been practiced just as long, but why has this consumption become something aspirational? The home improvement and gourmet cooking shows, the profiles of music stars' houses on MTV Cribs, the proliferation of gadget and other "next wave, cutting edge" consumerist tracking blogs; all seem to add up to a culture that is quite different from the consumption of the past, because the consumption is no longer specific to a particular class of people. Marketers cast their net wide, now, and hope to capture as much market-share as possible, creditworthiness be damned.

It's quite possible that this strive-for-more, cooler, faster, is a product of how the current crop of twenty, thirty and even forty-somethings grew up: in the age of television and electronics. We've moved so quickly from a time when toys were simple, well-crafted things on which to focus a child's power of imagination and play, to a time when product placement and cross-over marketing ensure that everything already comes with a detailed backstory and history. For instance, video games, as enjoyable as they can be, are the outlet of the creator's imagination -- if there are spaces in which a child can insert his or her own fantasies, those spaces are becoming narrower and fewer. What once allowed a free-form imagination that -- in my mind -- gave rise to the great age of invention that preceded the past twenty years is being slowly choked off. (That's not to say it would disappear; the human capacity for creativity is boundless even within the confines we've put it.)

The beauty and trap of this kind of culture is that it pacifies. Like Noam Chomsky's somewhat dour attitude toward spectator sports, with their emphasis on our-team jingoism and meaningless statistics, and the lethargy it inspires towards more meaningful pursuits like political and cultural awareness, caring about "nice things" and "new things" is really the ultimate form that soma has taken, that narcotizing drug that keeps the peace, at a cost, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Sure, we have Prozac and Viagra, but these are drugs people use to cope with the demands of our culture, not the sources of its problems. The real opiate of the people these days is not religion, but shopping. Well, that's too glib. What's taken the place of religion for those who aren't particularly religious is whatever occupies their time to exhaustion, to the point where trivial things become central to their consciousness. Whether that's the 9/11 conspiracy theorist's decidedly narrow view of the world, or the shopaholic's energetic efforts to collect a particular line of shoes, I think it's all of a piece. In Google-world, where massive amounts of information on any particular subject can be pushed to our screens instantly, it's no wonder that minutiae is what drives most of our waking moments.

It struck me, on the mountain, as hundreds of other eager leisure seekers shusshed past me on their technologically advanced skis, outfitted in expensive Gore-Tex and neoprene, that we had lost some of the pleasure of what inspired the first skiiers in Scandinavia -- being alone among the vistas, in the expansive realm of nature, ignorant of particular techniques and taxonomy and joyful in the way of children in discovery. (It was also pretty useful in those snow-bound countries.) Instead, we've taken the Olympian motto of performance culture ("faster, higher, stronger") to a level where it has become the motto of our times, in much of our endeavours. Unlike those pundits of the past who praised the dwindling of the work-week from seven days to six and then to five, doing nothing -- really doing nothing -- is the biggest crime you can commit. So do something. And if you are going to do something, if you're going to spend your time on leisure, you had better not do it leisurely -- get the best equipment, spend the bucks, work at it! It's not worth doing if you don't!