In the city of Drachten in the Netherlands a four-way intersection sits in the middle of a town square. Cars, trucks, buses, and bicycles all weave between one other as they navigate the road.
A middle-aged Dutchman walks casually into the intersection, talking with a friend. He turns around, walking backwards. He closes his eyes. The traffic moves around him, slowly and without stopping. No one honks or yells. He is accepted as just another part of the street.
The man is the late Hans Monderman, a leading traffic engineer and the designer of the Laweiplein, the intersection in Drachten where he liked to test pedestrian safety by walking into traffic with his eyes closed.
When Monderman was first asked to redesign the intersection, it was congested and quite dangerous. Then he removed the traffic lights. He got rid of the signs. Then the curbs. After seven years, the intersection was unrecognizable. Traffic moved more slowly, but the rate was constant, and the rate of accidents plummeted.
As author Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book, “Traffic,” the secret behind Monderman’s solution was his theory that there are two kinds of space: the “traffic world” and the “social world.”
The traffic world is the realm of cars, where speed and efficiency rule the road. The social world is the realm of people, where cars are guests and must abide by the house rules. A six-lane interstate is part of the traffic world, more suited to self-driving cars than humans. A town square is part of the social world, where drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians must pay attention to one another so they can all get along. By removing traffic signals in the intersection, Monderman forced vehicles to follow the rules of the social world, moving at human scale and speed.
Monderman’s theory provides a useful framework to talk about labor versus leisure, as described in Part 1 of this series. Labor is work that we do to get something else, like food, shelter, or money. Like the interstate, the world of labor is all about efficiency, getting to a destination as fast as possible. In its place, labor is very good.
In contrast, leisure is work we do for its own sake, for no other purpose than that it makes us more human. Leisure is like the social world, where success is measured by activities that celebrate and affirm the world.
Living in the social world isn’t easy in modern society. Ray Oldenburg makes this point in his classic book on lonely modern existence, “The Great Good Place.” Even the design of our cities and neighborhoods makes it hard to act like a human being, Oldenburg explains:
Few of us range as casually, as freely, or as comfortably in our neighborhoods as our grandparents did in theirs. Indeed, many homes have no sidewalks out front. People are expected to come and go in the privacy of automobiles. Traveling in this manner, people cross an environment without ever becoming part of it.
Is leisure possible in a world like this?
In the pre-modern era, the limits of technology meant that most work had to be done according to the rules of the social world. Before electric light, people rose when the sun rose and slept when it went down. Before the automobile, a man traveled at the speed of his own legs. Under these limits, people were more likely to live at a human scale instead of pursuing lives of endless efficiency.
In "The Acceleration of Tranquility," Mark Helprin puts the reader in the skin of an English politician on holiday in Italy in the summer of 1906. You (the character) are a busy man, but your remote location makes it impossible for you to be in the thick of the politic scene back in London. In fact, the world you inhabit makes it difficult to be anywhere other than in the immediate present.
The main advantage this man has over us is that his life is full of gaps between desire and satisfaction. He wonders what is happening in London, but he must wait to find out. He sits bored on the patio in the afternoon and stays bored until he finds something to do. He goes out on the lake in a rowboat and is overwhelmed by the beauty around him, and if he wants to preserve that beauty, he must hold it in his mind until he has a chance to paint it or describe it in words. In some ways, he's worse off than the average English politician today, but he is much richer in time. His holiday is full of these gaps. His life is full of these gaps. No doubt he would watch TV if he could. But he can't. The only thing he can do is be in the moment – because he can’t be anywhere else.
Those gaps, part of the pattern of the social world, are what make leisure possible. If we fill every scrap of time with productive labor or mind-numbing distraction, we will never find time for leisure. Unlike our ancestors, we must carefully preserve space for the social world, lest the traffic world sweep us away.
To cultivate leisure, you must get comfortable going slow. Remember, the social world does not care about efficiency. Take the long way home from work. Park on the far side of the parking lot. Listen to an entire album instead of skipping to your favorite song. Unsubscribe from Netflix and get a DVD player. Buy a ticket to a local theater and arrive 20 minutes early. Leave your phone at home. Make it hard to take the easy route.
Helprin’s Englishman did not have to make empty spaces in his day because they were already there. We have to do it consciously.
What’s more, we have to train ourselves to accept the empty spaces because waiting is always uncomfortable. When you feel the first tickles of boredom, don’t reach for your phone to brush them away. When curiosity pricks you, don’t immediately satiate it. Look up words in the dictionary instead of googling them. Force yourself to listen to an album all the way through instead of skipping to your favorite song. Watch an entire movie without pulling out your phone. Let yourself wonder. Make peace with boredom.
Christian Leithart is a writer and teacher and the co-founder of Little Word, a children's book publishing company. He lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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