In Defense of Wasting Time

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

As a headmaster and teacher, my professional vocation is to help parents raise young men who are fully alive. Many people assume that this task mostly entails helping the young men at my school develop skills that will prepare them to excel in college and in their careers. Of course, most people would recognize, upon reflection, that there are other parts to life beyond one’s nine-to-five that are equally important. The implicit assumption, however, is that professional excellence requires specific training, whereas excellence in the rest of life is mostly automatic. Work requires practice; nonwork comes without thought or effort.

And there is truth to this idea. To become an excellent professional requires thought and effort and training. And becoming an excellent professional is crucial for one’s human development—beyond even financial recompense. Given the amount of time spent working, it is not wrong to say that the habits one develops in and through work will become one’s virtues or vices.

That said, leisure is equally important to work. In truth, it is even more fundamental. And it requires practice. Boys need to “waste time” if they are to grow into psychologically and morally healthy men who are spiritually alert.

This may sound contrary to advice I’ve given elsewhere on my Substack. Let me explain. 

I don’t mean boys should regularly lounge around with nothing to do, aimlessly walking around the house looking for any possible glimpse of excitement. After all, we hear that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Indeed, a boy’s idle mind and idle hands are vulnerable to making wrong choices. But what I mean is that the tyranny of efficient productivity should not dominate the lives of our boys.

We tend to over-value efficiency in our society. We believe that every task should be performed perfectly in the fastest possible way, and that we should perform as many such tasks as possible every day. 

I’ll leave the first aspect of efficiency unexplored in this article and agree that it is generally true—-although we also know that the perfect can sometimes be the enemy of the good, and that performing a task perfectly may not always be the best thing to do. But today I want to address the second aspect of efficiency: the idea that it is ideal to perform as many tasks as possible in any given day.

This is not a healthy standard for boys—really, for anyone. Boys should be allowed to spend time on tasks that serve no ulterior purpose, tasks that he will not use for any academic, athletic, artistic, or other strategic advancement. A boy should regularly have time when he is not doing homework, or studying for a test, or reading for school, or practicing a sport for an organized competition, or rehearsing music for a concert. He should be given the time and space to spend time simply doing something he enjoys precisely because he enjoys it.

In other words, a boy needs to have positive passions. These are found by engaging in intrinsically enjoyable activities that allow his mind to rest and his heart to expand. Such activities should leave him feeling energized, more at peace with himself, and more open to others. A side effect of such activities will be that he is more alert to others and helpful around the house, though that is not the motivating reason they are done.

What falls in this category? Anything that a boy can do for fun because he enjoys it, and that is mentally healthy and emotionally fulfilling. For instance, exercising for its own sake—whether playing a game in the backyard with his siblings and friends, or working out—playing an instrument to relax, reading for fun, painting, sketching—the list could go on.

What underlies all of these positive passions is a boy’s active engagement in an exercise of talent and skill which, unlike sports practice or rehearsals or homework, is not under competitive scrutiny. 

Such activities differ from negative passions, which are fun and pleasurable but do not lead to a restful mind or an expansion of the heart. These activities are absorbing in a debilitating, potentially even addictive, way. Think of video games, scrolling on social media—screens in general. These activities captivate the mind and bombard it with images, hyper-activating it for no benefit. They leave the mind tired and the heart empty.
So, boys should waste time well. They need to practice good leisure regularly. If they don’t, they may develop habits of character that lead them to waste away. If they do, they will not only enjoy their lives more, they will be more enjoyable to be around.