VACATION TIME UNUSED

Commentary: Does the pandemic make it harder to take long stretches of annual leave?


It isn’t always about having too much to do or not knowing where to draw boundaries. Many still believe leave is wasted without travel, says CNA’s Grace Yeoh.

Workers in the office. (File photo: iStock)



Grace Yeoh@GraceYeohCNA
27 Aug 2021


SINGAPORE: I am quite the hypocrite when it comes to fighting hustle culture.

Despite reminding my friends of the importance of rest amid the pandemic and busy seasons at work, and writing many times about tackling burnout, I haven’t taken annual leave since the start of this financial year. As much as I am entitled to do so, I suspect I don’t really want nor see a need to.

But it’s not for want of trying.

In an attempt to walk the talk for this commentary, I signed into my company’s HR portal several times, stared at the amount of leave I have remaining, selected a two-week block when I could afford time off … and closed the tab without submitting my leave application.

This conundrum isn’t unique to the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, I found myself unable to completely “switch off” my work brain during my leave. I was constantly brainstorming new ideas for stories, on account of being on social media.

Eventually, it became hard to take leave because I was convinced it was a waste of time, since I was still “working”.

And when the pandemic hit, it forced me to slow down in my daily work habits. I no longer needed long stretches of leave to recuperate like I did pre-pandemic when leave was set aside for obvious leisure activities, such as travel.

Either way, I was stuck with mounting pressure to clear my annual leave — but now, with the added feeling that I’d be wasting it if I spent it in Singapore.

WHY WE DON’T TAKE LEAVE

I’m not alone in my failure to clear leave.

It might have been easier to find reasons to take leave before the pandemic; few people took a two-week break without leaving the country or making major plans with friends and family.

Still, we know people who didn’t clear their leave and accumulated so much that they had to give it up.

Whenever friends struggled with clearing leave pre-pandemic because they had too much work and not enough time to complete it before their leave, I’d scoff and tell them work is never ending, so it’s pointless to heap such an unrealistic expectation on oneself.

They would cite common reasons for not going on leave: Guilt for “abandoning” colleagues, unspoken expectations to maintain constant productivity to remain in an employer’s good books, tying self-worth to work performance. Some would even humblebrag that they couldn’t afford time off, seeing being busy as a mark of competence.

Underlying these reasons, however, was an inability to draw boundaries, which only seems to have worsened almost two years into work-from-home (WFH). For many of us, work has become the default, and life is whatever that’s left over after we’re done for the day, however late that may be.

WE STILL CAN’T TRAVEL

Pre-pandemic, travel was synonymous with rest, so we reserved long stretches of leave for faraway adventures. As a result, being unable to travel has affected our leave plans.

In December 2020, CNA ran a story about companies that adjusted their leave policies because employees were struggling to clear their leave since being unable to travel for leisure.

“Many employees tend to not take annual leave when they are working from home, as they do not feel like they need a ‘getaway’ from the office environment,” Ms Jaya Dass, Randstad’s managing director for Singapore and Malaysia, had shared

The report added that some employees hoped to carry their leave forward to this year for leisure travel purposes. This was despite no clear sign that we’d be out of the woods.

When the COVID-19 multi-ministry task force announced on Thursday (Aug 19) that Singapore would launch its first vaccinated travel lanes with Germany and Brunei on Sep 8, my social media feed was filled with excited updates from friends mentally planning their next trip.

Even though the news was merely a baby step towards travelling again, it offered a glimmer of hope that long holidays and quarantine-free travel weren’t a pipe dream anymore.

Yet, the news also lulled me into a false sense of hope that the country I’d been holding out for could be next in line, making me more reluctant to spend my annual leave. I’d been saving my leave to visit loved ones in Malaysia despite their rising COVID-19 case numbers.

While it’s unrealistic to save my leave until Malaysia reopens for international leisure travel, the allure of travel is understandable. With travel, our daily environment is markedly different, enforcing at least a physical escape from work, if not a mental one.

Work from home has altered the way we view leave.

(Photo: Mimi Thian/ Unsplash)


But WFH means we remain in the same space that we work on leave, making it harder to detach from work. For instance, we might decide to check our email to mitigate the stress of clearing hundreds of emails at once upon return to work, and refusing this impulse is harder now since we’re within close reach of our work desk while on leave.

Even if we cave and attend to work just once a day, these minute actions pile up, preventing us from completely going on vacation. For some of us, we’d still feel on edge during our leave that we might even require another break to decompress from the break.

Ultimately, using a long stretch of leave to do anything "less than" travel feels futile and wasteful now.

CHANGING OUR PERSPECTIVE OF LEAVE

Regardless of whether we want to clear our leave, the reality is we need to. Those of us who experience inertia could start to look at annual leave in a different light.

For one, there’s no need to take a large chunk at once, even though this may have been our norm before the pandemic.

Instead, we could consider taking a day’s leave every alternate week, ensuring we work four-day weeks at least twice a month.

Related:


From unlimited leave to four-day weeks, some firms are embracing more flexible time-off policies


There have already been loud calls to implement a four-day work week, with some companies like Microsoft Japan already finding gains, according to a Forbes report from 2019. Workers were “happier” and there was also a “40 per cent gain in productivity”.

But rather than wait for policymakers or employers to decide what’s best for us, perhaps we can experiment with this idea ourselves.

For me, Wednesday is the best day of the week to go on leave, because it allows me to be hyper productive for a short two days, take a breather, then go full force again for a couple of days before the weekend.

Even though it might appear such a brief break barely allows us to destress before we dive right back into work the next day, this single-day leave isn’t about deep rest. It’s simply akin to a hydration pitstop in a marathon, replenishing our energy for the next leg.

Moreover, taking a day off on a constant basis, rather than accumulating leave only to take a few weeks at once, might give you something to look forward to regularly and help mental wellbeing in the long term.

Related:

Commentary: Cure to burnout requires a pervasive culture of rest

Alternatively, consider this radical approach: We don’t need to have a purpose for taking leave.

This is something I’ve always intellectually understood, but I only recently realised I never quite practised it. I took leave when I felt I’d earned my rest, such as after a productive few months or goals were met. And when I finally took leave, I needed my rest to be productive too, lest I “waste” my precious time off work.

But what if resting without a productivity-driven goal wasn’t a waste of time and was, in fact, liberating?

To many of us, especially people like me, this foreign concept takes some getting used to. But I want to learn to rest for its own sake, not because it will help me fulfill a great or meaningful purpose.

Taking leave could simply mean not having to set an alarm.

Grace Yeoh is a senior journalist with CNA.

1. The Right To Be Lazy

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 23 Duane Street, New York 1898 PAUL LAFARGUE (1841–1911) AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ABOLISH WORK!
Some Chinese shun grueling careers for

 'low-desire life'

FROM FUEDALISM TO LATE CAPITALI$M IN 100 YEARS

People walk across an intersection during rush hour in Beijing. (AP)

Updated: 04 Jul 2021, 

Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries

BEIJING : Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China's mountain southwest to “lie flat."

Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting gruelling careers for a “low-desire life." That is clashing with the party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.

“Work was OK, but I didn't like it much," Guo said.

“What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?"

“Lying flat" is a “resistance movement" to a “cycle of horror" from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country's most prominent business magazine.

“In today's society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized," Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply lie flat?'"

It isn't clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of major cities. Judging by packed rush hour subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese slog away at the best jobs they can get.



Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China's population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5 per cent from its 2011 peak.

“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness," the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to lie flat' in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful."

The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.

Official data show China's economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.

In a sign of the issue's political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat" declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.

Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, mobile phone cases and other “Lie Flat"-themed products are disappearing from online sales platforms.

Urban employees complain that work hours have swelled to “9 9 6," or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.

“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era," a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.

Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell" of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.

“Chasing fame and fortune does not attract me. I am so tired," said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old graduate student.

Some professionals are cutting short their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.

Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she is quitting at 45, a decade before the legal minimum retirement age for women, to move with her Croatian-born husband to his homeland.

“I want to retire early. I don't want to fight any more," Xu said. “I'm going to other places."

Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party's announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two.

The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.

Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.

Xia writes that she moved to a valley in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, for a “low-desire life" after working in Hong Kong. She said despite a high-status job as an English-language reporter, her rent devoured 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.

She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat" are giving up economic success when that's already is out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gulf between a wealthy elite and the majority.

“When resources are focused more and more on the few people at the head and their relatives, the workforce is cheap and replaceable," she wrote on Douban. “Is it sensible to entrust your destiny to small handouts from others?"

1. The Right To Be Lazy - SLP

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 23 Duane Street, New York 1898 PAUL LAFARGUE (1841–1911) AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary

2. 1. The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library

      https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

      2020-11-28 · The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes …

You’re Not Lazy — But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are
BYCHUCK MCKEEVER

So many of us feel exhausted and inadequate, lacking joy in our work and beating ourselves up over our supposed laziness. But we’re not lazy — we just live under an economic system that wants to wring more and more work out of us.

In their new book Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. (Sam Solomon / Unsplash)


Review of Laziness Does Not Exist, by Devon Price (Atria Books, 2021).

In George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie has died and exists in a sort of purgatory alongside the souls of others who, like Willie, do not know or cannot admit that they are dead. The story culminates with Willie’s realization, having witnessed his own funeral and his father’s life-altering grief, that he has died. His brave refusal to hide from that fact ultimately sets him and all the other souls in limbo free.


You are not sick, [Willie] said.

Stop talking, Mr. Vollman said. You will kindly stop talking at once.

There is a name for what ails us, [Willie] said. Do you not know it? Do you really not know it? …Dead, the boy said. Everyone, we are dead!”

In the world of Willie Lincoln and the other tortured souls conjured by Saunders, it is only by recognizing and naming their condition that they can free themselves. If they can’t name what ails them, they will be stuck in an eternal, hopeless present.

For many workers under capitalism, the problem is the same. We lack the name for what ails us, believing ourselves temporarily stuck instead of perpetually exploited. Without being able to name and confront what ails us, we lack the first fundamental tool for freeing ourselves. Attempts to explain this problem to people have filled libraries’ worth of Marxist texts and serve as the raison d’être for publications like this one. Where you’d be less likely to find any such explanation is the self-help section of your local bookstore.

That has changed with Laziness Does Not Exist, in which social psychologist Dr Devon Price seeks to explain to readers that their exhaustion, their feelings of inadequacy, and their lack of joy in their work are not born of their own moral failings, but are the inevitable consequences of living and working under capitalism. Self-help books, as a rule, exist to preach to readers that they can and should be doing more: more work, more exercise, more self-care, more self-advocacy. Our lives can be transformed, these books tell us, by making better individual choices.


Price takes a different approach, positing that the entire logic of self-help is backward. We aren’t miserable because we aren’t working hard enough at happiness, we’re miserable because we’re all working too hard at everything. What’s more, no one seems to believe it, including ourselves.

Price focuses specifically on one aspect of this phenomenon, what they call the “Laziness Lie.” According to Price, the Laziness Lie has three central tenets: our worth is our productivity, we cannot trust our own feelings and limits, and there is always more we could be doing.

We internalize this logic to such a degree that we learn to believe that “our skills and talents don’t really belong to us; they exist to be used. If we don’t gladly give our time, our talents, and even our lives to others, we aren’t heroic or good.” And we’re certainly more fireable.

From the Archives: "The Right to Be Lazy" | Dissent Magazine

www.dissentmagazine.org › blog › from-the-archives-t...

In 1883, Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, wrote The Right to Be Lazy, a political pamphlet that argued for liberation from the obligation to work

The Birth of “Laziness”

Where does this belief system come from? Price (who, full disclosure, I have corresponded with about the ideas in the book over the years with but never met) traces the Laziness Lie across American history, unpacking its roots in the Christianity of the country’s settlers and its utility in rationalizing slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor. By the time of the industrial revolution, Price writes, “Laziness had officially become not only a personal failing but a social ill to be defeated — and it has remained that way ever since.”

It seems fitting that the United States just inaugurated a president who campaigned in part on the idea that millennials deserve no empathy for their generation’s immiseration, and who shut down a pointed political question from a town hall attendee by challenging him to a pushup contest. Obviously, the idea that struggling people deserve no sympathy is bullshit. That our new president scoffs at the people ruined by a debt crisis he helped engineer over a long, pro-banking Senate career is just extra cruelty sprinkled on top. But even the savviest Biden-hating socialist is not immune to the ways these attitudes seep into our lives and our attitudes toward ourselves and others.

Capitalism demands that we function in a constant state of “speed up” at work, needing to cram ever more into the waking hours of our days regardless of our actual efficiency or productivity. What Price calls the “Laziness Lie” is really this demand for “speed up” taken to its inevitable extreme, such that it permeates all aspects of one’s life on or off the clock.Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

We repeat and reify the logic of our bosses in our own lives through social media and other avenues where the “hustle” is expected to be never-ending, even at home. Influencer culture, in Price’s view, has amplified the “Laziness Lie”: our meals must be Instagram-worthy, our living spaces minimalist and tidy, our bodies well-toned and well-dressed. As a result we treat fatness, tackiness, nonconformity, and other seeming imperfections as contemptible rather than default states of being.

Perversely, this phenomenon can even absorb its apparent opposite. No influencer’s Instagram grid is complete without a smattering of confessional posts. Look y’all, today was a hard day, I’m blessed by this life but it’s not as glamorous as it seems. Just gotta keep smiling… These humanizing offerings don’t dismantle the logic of hustle culture, they reinforce it — because the implicit conclusion to each of them is …and I’m still getting up and doing it every day, so why aren’t you?

The ceaseless demands put upon us by our own belief in this pernicious myth — and the attendant expectations of being an open and available friend, a politically and socially conscious member of society, a generous and committed romantic partner, and so forth — combine to put a crushing weight on just about everyone who works for a living.

Price relates anecdotes and data about the ways that particular populations, such as people with mental illnesses, are compoundingly harmed by our societal contempt for laziness. But their analysis also includes the harm done to those with no particularly remarkable barriers who still don’t rise to the occasion as students or employees or voters. In other words, the laziness myth hurts the vast majority of us.
Laziness Is Fake, Disenfranchisement Is Real

It is disenfranchisement, not laziness, Price argues, that makes even relatively healthy people step back from challenges and check out from the world. If we don’t see the point of our schoolwork or any meaning in the jobs we’ve considered applying to, we’re not likely to complete those tasks.

If we don’t vote even when shamed by others about doing our civic duty, we’re not too lazy to bother, we probably had to work that day and didn’t have the energy to go stand in line at the polls for a few extra hours (to say nothing of the pitiful options on offer, though Price doesn’t mention that).

On top of all this, most other people we know are going through some version of these problems, too, meaning that the exhausting demands on our time don’t end when our professional or academic obligations do. We need help, and so do our friends and family, and we’re all using each other for it.(

Ben Blennerhassett / Unsplash)

A more explicitly socialist text would probably unpack these same phenomena as products of capitalist alienation, not just a general form of disenfranchisement. But Price has not leaned on the most obvious layers of the working class to make the bulk of their argument (though retail workers, health care workers, and bartenders do appear in their interviews).

Instead we get a diverse cross-section of people whose time is not their own, from people experiencing homelessness to overwhelmed grad students to semi-professional streamers to working moms still wondering if they can “have it all.”

While the stories and conditions vary, a single thread runs through them all: no one has really escaped the self-loathing and other harmful behaviors we have absorbed as we try to work and survive in a capitalist society. Price correctly describes the normalization of overwork as a public health crisis, and their interviews bear out this diagnosis — marriages, bright futures, and, in the case of one memorable interviewee who was so overworked that he began vomiting blood, internal organs all get damaged by workers’ inability to say no to the demands of a capitalist society.

In this regard, Laziness is something like a fox in the henhouse: Price tells readers that we are not alone in feeling profoundly ill-used and sick because of the demands of our economy and culture, and makes their radical arguments broadly appealing by casting such a wide net in their interview pool. (It also doesn’t hurt that the book’s title is ambiguous enough to disguise its intent. Were your boss to see you reading it, she might think you a particularly motivated employee looking for tips on how to quit slacking.)
Collective Action, Not “Self-Help”

This trick of Laziness — to exist as an anti-capitalist manifesto posing as a self-help book — gives Price a tough needle to thread. Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

Price is clearly aware of this contradiction, as one of the book’s currents is that precious few individuals are capable of maintaining anything resembling a decent life under the demands of capitalism, much less saving the world.

This is not a book designed to teach downtrodden Americans how to throw off the yoke of their exploiters, though Price does repeatedly plug collective workplace action and unionization as tools. Rather, Laziness Does Not exist tells its readers, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that they are being exploited, and there is a name for what ails them: capitalism. And while the book’s prescriptions for dismantling entire systems are thin, it is a useful compendium of anecdotes, insights, and data that might help more people survive under those systems.

“Sometimes,” Price opines, “the best thing good people can do is hunker down, care for one another, and survive.” Plain survival is not enough to change the world. But changing the world requires that masses of people understand their conditions more fully and have the time and energy to fight.Self-help books are by nature dedicated to improving, well, the self. But the full-scale societal transformation required to liberate the overworked world from capitalism can only come through sustained, organized mass action.

This is a drastic departure from the usual offerings in the self-help section, which often start in the same place — What you feel about your situation is okay to feel — but head in the opposite direction — and here’s how to push past those feelings to go produce, earn, and do more!

Self-help doesn’t just perpetuate capitalist ideology by peddling the myth that every individual is capable of and responsible for changing their own conditions. It does so by insisting that our very human desire to live for something other than work is simply a challenge to be overcome.

Contrast Price’s book with two recent self-help bestsellers by Rachel Hollis, Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, in which the author “encourages, entertains, and even kicks a little butt, all to convince you to do whatever it takes to get real… Because you really can live with passion and hustle.”


She “identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt, and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence, and believing in yourself.” Hollis isn’t teaching her readers that their feelings and experiences matter simply because they are human beings with emotional needs, but that they matter because they can be catalogued for use or disposal in service of one’s ambition.

The ultimate irony of Laziness is that it could actually be a useful tool for employers, as it contains reams of research on the ways that making people work less actually makes them work better — if not on their boss’s terms, at least on workers’ own. Abolishing overwork and other abusive practices might increase many companies’ productivity, and certainly employee longevity.

But overwork is not just about profit or productivity, it’s about control. Companies are incentivized to own as much of an employee’s time as possible for what they’re paid, whether by extending the salaried work week into nights and weekends or reducing the break time of hourly wage-earners.

Laziness Does Not Exist is the rare self-help book that understands the basic truth that the majority of our problems are not of our individual making, and therefore cannot be solved individually. Accordingly, Price does not promise tools for salvation, but tools for survival, and permission to forgive oneself for not being able to change the world alone.

There can be no real “self-help” without collective work to understand and dismantle the system under which we all labor. Like Lincoln in the Bardo’s dead, we must be able to name what ails us before we can get free. It’s capitalism, not laziness.

  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chuck McKeever is a community college instructor and union organizer living in Seattle. He is the author of A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail.

FURTHER READING

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• Aidan Harper

Americans Work Too Damn Much

• Jamie McCallum

More Free Time — for Everyone

• Stan De Spiegelaere

Living, Not Just Surviving

• Alyssa Battistoni

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

The Bulgarian city of Plovdiv has an almost untranslatable word – “aylyak” – that manifests as a refusal to get caught up in the rat race and a scepticism about the value of overwork.

By Will Buckingham

5 November 2020

Bulgaria’s second city of Plovdiv is proud of its reputation for doing things its own way. As soon as you step off the bus from the capital of Sofia, you can feel the change in pace of life. People walk more slowly. They seem to have more time on their hands. The traffic is less hectic. As you walk to the city centre through the park, where old men gather to play chess and people lounge and chat in the shade of the old trees, Plovdiv immediately feels different. There’s a kind of insouciance to Plovdiv, something that is both immediately apparent and hard to put your finger on.

In the downtown Kapana district, people spill out of bars and cafes into the pedestrian streets. Under brightly painted murals on the walls, groups of young people hang out, flirt and check their phones. In the cafe by the Dzhumaya Mosque in the town centre, people sit for hours and sip cups of Turkish coffee. Even the cats in the cobbled streets of the old town seem more languid than elsewhere. They stretch and purr, then they roll over and go back to sleep. If you ask the people here why the city is so relaxed, they will tell you: Plovdiv, they will say, is “aylyak”.



Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second-largest city and one of the oldest cities in Europe

 (Credit: Nataliya Nazarova/Alamy)

The word “aylyak” is not much used outside of Plovdiv, even though it appears in Bulgarian dictionaries from the late 19th Century. It is a loan-word from the Turkish “aylaklık”, which means “idleness”, “dawdling” or “vagabondage”, and it’s rooted in the Turkish “aylık”, meaning “month”.

According to Yana Genova, director of the Sofia Literature and Translation House, the original meaning of aylyak was somebody hired to work month-by-month, who consequently knew what it was to have time on their hands. The verb that goes with aylyak is “bichim”, a derivative of the verb “bicha”, which means to strike, to whip, or to cut beams and boards from a tree trunk. The idea of striking, whipping or cutting is a reminder that aylyak is something active. If you want to practice aylyak, you have to slice out chunks of time for yourself. You must take the initiative to sever yourself from your daily concerns.

But whatever the origins of the word, in contemporary Plovdiv, aylyak has taken on its own meaning and significance, something not to be translated so much as lived. When you ask people to explain what it means, more often than not they will tell you a joke. The joke goes like this. A citizen of Plovdiv is hanging out with a Spanish visitor to the city. “What is aylyak?” the Spaniard asks. The Bulgarian thinks for a few moments, and then says, “It’s like your mañana, mañana, but without all the stress.”

In 2019, Plovdiv shared the title of European Capital of Culture with Matera in Italy. As a part of the City of Culture activities, one organisation – the Fire Theatre Mime Company, headed by Bulgarian actor, director and mime artist Plamen Radev Georgiev – ran a series of public consultations to explore aylyak in more depth. He wanted to know what aylyak is, what its origins are and how it became so closely associated with Plovdiv.



Plovdiv was awarded the title of European Capital of Culture in 2019

(Credit: Mehdi33300/Alamy)

I caught up with Georgiev in a cafe in Sofia. He was born in Stara Zagora, about 80km to the north-east, and when he arrived in Plovdiv in 2018, it was as an outsider to the complexities of aylyak culture. “Our research was difficult,” he told me. “People asked why we were interested in aylyak. They said it wasn’t a value at all. It was just laziness.”


It’s like your mañana, mañana, but without all the stress

But through the public discussions, a broader picture emerged. Aylyak, people said, was about finding time. It was about sitting down for breakfast with friends and finding that you were still hanging out by nightfall. It was about taking pleasure in your environment. It was tied in with social status, with a kind of dandyish wandering the streets with nothing to do. And, on a deeper level – Georgiev called this “Zen aylyak” – it was to do with freedom of the soul. “Aylyak means that you can be engaged with the difficulties of life, but you remain safe from all life’s problems,” he said.

In Sofia, many people I spoke with were sceptical about aylyak, seeing it as nothing more than Capital of Culture branding or hipster marketing. I, too, was unconvinced. So, I caught the bus from Sofia to Plovdiv, to spend several days in the city and whip some aylyak of my own. In Plovdiv, I talked to Dr Svetoslava Mancheva, an anthropologist and director of ACEA Mediator, an organisation dedicated to linking communities and urban spaces. Originally from Kardzhali in the country’s south-west, Svetoslava is a self-confessed convert to aylyak. She has been living in Plovdiv for 10 years and has no intention of leaving. “Many people come to live here specifically because it is aylyak,” she said. Her colleague, Elitsa Kapusheva, told me she was brought up in Plovdiv but recently moved back from Berlin. She was glad to be home, she said: Berlin was good, but it wasn’t aylyak.



The city has a uniquely relaxed vibe, with locals taking time to slow down and enjoy life (Credit: ICP/Alamy)

For Mancheva, aylyak is rooted in Plovdiv’s long history of cultural diversity. The historian Mary C Neuberger describes how the city was a thriving commercial hub in the 19th Century. Of all the cities in the Ottoman Empire, it was second only to Istanbul, and was home to Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Roma, Armenians and Slavs, crowded together in the streets and kafenes, or coffeehouses. Mancheva says that aylyak was a response to the challenges of living alongside strangers. “It’s about finding a space of your own in the city,” she said. “For me, the ground of aylyak is communication. You don’t need to like each other. What matters is the will to talk, the desire to understand.”

Historical accounts of Plovdiv’s coffeehouses in the 19th Century describe them as places where artisans and merchants mingled and where time passed slowly. The 19th-Century Bulgarian poet Hristo Danov wrote disapprovingly of how people spent all day in kafenes. People go to the kafene, he wrote, to smoke, talk, drink coffee, and “impatiently wait for the sun to set so they can move on to plum brandy”. Outsiders also picked up on Plovdiv’s uniquely relaxed feel. In his 1906 travel account, the British traveller John Foster Fraser was entranced by the pace of life in Plovdiv (then called Philippopolis):

“Picture the scene. A garden, lit with many lamps. Beneath the trees innumerable tables. At the tables sat ‘all Philippopolis,’ sipping coffee, drinking beer, toasting one another in litres of wine. At one end of the garden was a little stage. There was a Hungarian band which played rhapsodically… It was Sunday night and Philippopolis was enjoying itself.”



Plovdiv's 2nd-Century AD amphitheatre is one of the best-preserved ancient theatres in the world (Credit: Evgeni Dinev Photography/Getty Images)

As I chatted to Mancheva and Kapusheva about aylyak, they returned again and again to one idea. Aylyak is about finding space. It is about finding space in a busy day to drink coffee. It is about finding nooks and crevices in the city – alleyways, small parks, benches – where you can hang out with friends, play music, drink beer or chat. It is about making space for others when you communicate. And, as Georgiev told me, it is about finding a space of freedom in the middle of life’s difficulties. For those who have developed the knack, like Mancheva and Kapusheva, there is no better way of living.

Aylyak means that you can be engaged with the difficulties of life, but you remain safe from all life’s problems

After several days in Plovdiv, I lost my scepticism and learned how to bichim aylyak. I strolled the streets. I took it easy. And strangely, I found I got no less done, only everything was done with less stress. Towards the end of my stay, I wondered whether Plovdiv has something to offer the rest of the world. I emailed the Bulgarian writer Filip Gyurov, who researched aylyak as a philosophy of life and as an alternative to economic growth as part of his MSc thesis at Lund University. “It is not all about the hustle and bustle of the big city, the need to buy the newest tech toy, the need to always climb the social ladder,” Gyurov wrote to me. “People, especially young people, have experienced the awful side effects of burnout. Hence the need to slow down, to de-grow, to live more in sync with nature and ourselves.”

On my last afternoon in Plovdiv, I sat in the cafe outside the Dzhumaya Mosque. I ordered a Turkish coffee and a portion of kyunefe, a dessert that originated in the Middle East and that, in a stroke of culinary brilliance, combines baklava and cheese. The coffee arrived with a small glass of sweet rosewater syrup that took the edge off the bitterness. Beside the mosque, underneath the rose bushes, a ginger and white cat dozed peaceably. I didn’t have my watch. I felt no need to check my phone. I had no appointments to keep. I drank my coffee and let the afternoon unfold, knowing that I had all the time in the world.



Aylyak is rooted in Plovdiv’s long history of cultural diversity, when the city was a thriving commercial hub (Credit: Ivan Hristov/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Soul of the City is a series from BBC Travel that invites you to uncover the unique characteristics of cities around the world through the stories of the people who live there.

Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

www.marxists.org › archive › lafargue › lazy

Nov 13, 2003 — (1883). Written: Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883. Source: The Right To Be Lazy and Other Studies Translated: Charles Kerr First Published: ...

The day is dawning on a four-day work week

1930 IWW.ORG

June 4, 2020 3.07pm EDT

Like any crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to rethink how we do things.

As we near the 100-day mark since the pandemic was declared, one area getting a significant attention is the workplace, where a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream.

For example, when millions more Canadians started working from home, many businesses were forced to experiment with telecommuting. Interestingly, many now say they’ll continue after the pandemic passes, because it benefits employers and employees alike.

Another idea, less widely tested than telecommuting, is generating buzz: the four-day work week. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the possibility of a shortened work week as a way to divvy up jobs, encourage local tourism, help with work-life balance and increase productivity.

As a sociologist who teaches about work and wrote a book about productivity, I believe she’s right.
Not a compressed schedule

A four-day work week must not be confused with a compressed schedule that has workers squeeze 37.5 to 40 hours of work into four days instead of five. For reasons that should be clearer below, that won’t help us now.



A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.

A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

Read more: A four-day working week could be the shot in the arm post-coronavirus tourism needs

The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.Most employees probably wouldn’t mind spending their own money on essentials provided at the office in exchange for a four-day work week. (Jasmin Sessler/Unsplash)

Shorter work weeks reduce the number of sick days taken, and on their extra day off, employees don’t use the office’s toilet paper or utilities, reducing their employer’s costs. Therefore, while it is counter-intuitive, it’s possible for people to work less at the same salary while improving their employer’s bottom line. That people might have to spend more of their own money on toilet paper is a concession most workers would probably accept.

The same body of research also has more predictable findings: people like working less.
Entrenched morality of work

If it makes this much sense, why don’t we have a four-day week already? It turns out this question is more than 150 years old.

Some of the answer pertains to the logistics involved in transforming our whole system of work, that’s not the entire answer. After all, the work week has been reduced before, so it can technically be done again.

The rest of the reason is rooted in capitalism and class struggle.

Thinkers from Paul Lafargue (“The Right to Be Lazy,” first published in 1883) to Bertrand Russell (“In Praise of Idleness,” from 1932) and Kathi Weeks (“The Problem with Work,” from 2012) have concluded we resist worktime reductions in the face of supportive evidence — and our own desires for more leisure — because of the entrenched morality of work and the resistance on the part of “the rich” to “the idea that the poor should have leisure,” in Russell’s words.

We are extremely attached to the idea that hard work is virtuous, idle hands are dangerous and people with more free time can’t be trusted.
Four-day work weeks floated in the 1930s

Nobody is suggesting evil governments conspire with evil bosses to keep powerless people busy. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has shown, there was significant interest in shorter work hours in the 1920s and 30s, when the 30-hour week was touted as a way to “share” the work among the Great Depression’s unemployed and underemployed citizens
.
Henry Ford is seen in this 1919 photo. United States Library of Congress, CC BY

Even industrialists W. K. Kellogg and Henry Ford supported a six-hour day because they believed more rest would make for more productive workers. But Hunnicutt’s research in Work Without End reveals that some employers cut wages when they cut work hours, and when employees fought back, they dropped their demands for shorter work hours and focused instead on wage increases.

In the complex push and pull of capitalism, eventually even the New Deal, which influenced policy and discourse in Canada, shifted away from its early demands for more leisure toward demands for more work.

It’s quite possible we will do the same in our COVID-19 moment, and beg to be put back to work five days a week when this is all over.

But we have new reasons for considering shorter work weeks, and they might be more widely persuasive. It is also possible that we have finally given up on the false promise that working longer will translate into better lives. The four-day work week could be another wild idea that makes it through the pandemic’s open policy window.


Author

Karen Foster

Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie University
Disclosure statement

Karen Foster receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and funding from the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship program supported some of the research mentioned in this article.
Partners

The day is dawning on a four-day work week

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream — and that includes a four-day work week. (Simon Abrams/Unsplash)

Karen Foster, Dalhousie University
Like any crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to rethink how we do things.
As we near the 100-day mark since the pandemic was declared, one area getting a significant attention is the workplace, where a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream.
For example, when millions more Canadians started working from home, many businesses were forced to experiment with telecommuting. Interestingly, many now say they’ll continue after the pandemic passes, because it benefits employers and employees alike.
Another idea, less widely tested than telecommuting, is generating buzz: the four-day work week. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the possibility of a shortened work week as a way to divvy up jobs, encourage local tourism, help with work-life balance and increase productivity.
As a sociologist who teaches about work and wrote a book about productivity, I believe she’s right.

Not a compressed schedule

A four-day work week must not be confused with a compressed schedule that has workers squeeze 37.5 to 40 hours of work into four days instead of five. For reasons that should be clearer below, that won’t help us now.
A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.
A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

---

Read more: A four-day working week could be the shot in the arm post-coronavirus tourism needs

---

The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.

Most employees probably wouldn’t mind spending their own money on essentials provided at the office in exchange for a four-day work week. (Jasmin Sessler/Unsplash)

Shorter work weeks reduce the number of sick days taken, and on their extra day off, employees don’t use the office’s toilet paper or utilities, reducing their employer’s costs. Therefore, while it is counter-intuitive, it’s possible for people to work less at the same salary while improving their employer’s bottom line. That people might have to spend more of their own money on toilet paper is a concession most workers would probably accept.
The same body of research also has more predictable findings: people like working less.

Entrenched morality of work

If it makes this much sense, why don’t we have a four-day week already? It turns out this question is more than 150 years old.
Some of the answer pertains to the logistics involved in transforming our whole system of work, that’s not the entire answer. After all, the work week has been reduced before, so it can technically be done again.
The rest of the reason is rooted in capitalism and class struggle.
Thinkers from Paul Lafargue (“The Right to Be Lazy,” first published in 1883) to Bertrand Russell (“In Praise of Idleness,” from 1932) and Kathi Weeks (“The Problem with Work,” from 2012) have concluded we resist worktime reductions in the face of supportive evidence — and our own desires for more leisure — because of the entrenched morality of work and the resistance on the part of “the rich” to “the idea that the poor should have leisure,” in Russell’s words.
We are extremely attached to the idea that hard work is virtuous, idle hands are dangerous and people with more free time can’t be trusted.

Four-day work weeks floated in the 1930s

Nobody is suggesting evil governments conspire with evil bosses to keep powerless people busy. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has shown, there was significant interest in shorter work hours in the 1920s and 30s, when the 30-hour week was touted as a way to “share” the work among the Great Depression’s unemployed and underemployed citizens.

Henry Ford is seen in this 1919 photo. United States Library of Congress, CC BY

Even industrialists W. K. Kellogg and Henry Ford supported a six-hour day because they believed more rest would make for more productive workers. But Hunnicutt’s research in Work Without End reveals that some employers cut wages when they cut work hours, and when employees fought back, they dropped their demands for shorter work hours and focused instead on wage increases.
In the complex push and pull of capitalism, eventually even the New Deal, which influenced policy and discourse in Canada, shifted away from its early demands for more leisure toward demands for more work.
It’s quite possible we will do the same in our COVID-19 moment, and beg to be put back to work five days a week when this is all over.
But we have new reasons for considering shorter work weeks, and they might be more widely persuasive. It is also possible that we have finally given up on the false promise that working longer will translate into better lives. The four-day work week could be another wild idea that makes it through the pandemic’s open policy window.
Karen Foster, Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.