• 09 Nov, 2025 *

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that in my leisure I want to advance things, simply because I want them to be advanced, as opposed to merely drifting. But I remarked that this feels like it moves us back into the territory of work, rather than leisure, since we are choosing to do things as a means to some end, rather than simply doing them for the enjoyment of doing them.

Today I want to try and pull on this thread for a little bit longer, and differentiate what I mean by drifting, leisure, and work.

When I refer to drifting, really what I mean, is passive consumption of whatever happens to be immediately available. Scrolling social media, meandering from video to video on Youtube, reading whatever comes up on my feeds. This form of passive engagement isn’t on its own harmful, and indeed, it can be a fine way to disengage and unwind at the end of a day of work. But it generally doesn’t provide any kind of real satisfaction.

The danger of these activities is, by now, well discussed elsewhere. Social media feeds and short-form video platforms hijack our brain’s reward systems to keep us engaged, and keep us coming back for more whenever we do leave. So, in a way, these activities are highly engaging. But at the end of two hours of scrolling, are we coming away feeling refreshed? Satisfied? Did we learn something that brought us joy? Did we engage with a community that we care about?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then sure, these activities may be fulfilling. But I fear that for many, and certainly for myself, it is rarely the case. More often, we jump from take to take, from reel to reel, occasionally laughing a little, and maybe hearing some gossip about politics or celebrities or influencers.

And so that is what I would consider drifting. When we are primarily engaging with things that we are choosing not out of passion, or interest, or community, or even our own satisfaction. We are consuming what is in front of us, passively. And in modern times, these passive inputs are optimized to keep us engaged in this way as long as possible.

But does this differ, say, from sitting in the park, or walking in the woods, and merely paying attention to squirrels rooting around under the trees, the calls of the birds, and the smell of the autumn leaves under foot?

This, of course, is equally passive. And depending on your temperament, it may be boring, or it may be delightful. But I would say that one important difference is that being present in nature does not have the same artificial, optimized stickiness that the previous drifting activities I mentioned above undoubtedly have. Sitting in the park for 2 hours without looking at your phone, or doing anything but being present in your immediate surroundings will feel much longer than 2 hours scrolling instagram.

So drifting is not inherently bad. Passive leisure can be restorative. In times of stress, scrolling social media can be a welcome distraction, just as walking in the park can clear our heads and calm our nerves.

But the risk of drifting is that a life of only drifting is not satisfying. So if your are not satisfied by your work, and your only leisure is drifting, this is a recipe for a consumption by meaninglessness. Combined with the stickiness of modern drifting activities, such passive consumption poses a substantial risk indeed.

Having discussed drifting at some length, let us now turn to more active forms of leisure, and consider how this may be differentiated from work.

To be active, rather than passive, we must be choosing to engage in some activity. We may pick up a book we are interested in reading. We may write a blog post about something we care about. We may call a friend, go to the gym, or hike the Appalachian trail. We may play intramural sports, or paint still lifes, or take pottery classes.

Insofar as these are not work, they should not be motivated by anything related to doing better in our occupation, or developing some future business or occupation. They should be things we want to do, merely because we want to do them.

But to have these desires implies that we must have some meaningful engagement with the world, outside our occupation, and outside our passive leisure activities. We must be embedded in a community, or fascinated by some topic, or passionate about some kind of creative expression. And this is a desire that cannot simply be manufactured or chosen. It must be felt, truly, or we will not have the motivation to engage in these activities rather than passive leisure.

And this explains, in part, another facet of my difficulty in engaging in these activities. Because I am lucky enough to be engaged in work that I do care about, I tend to work quite a lot. I like to spend time improving at things relating to my occupation. And often when I have down time I am tired and want to drift.

But as I wrote yesterday, with my wife, these problems dissipate. Together we can participate in active leisure and feel good about how we spend our time. Our relationship is a clear engagement with the world. And that engagement creates the desire and motivation to engage in active leisure. We choose to go on dates, simply because we want to.

The risk with active leisure activities, is that they become obligations. If we are embedded in a community, and serving as volunteers, we may eventually feel that we can’t, in good conscience, stop. If we haven’t spoken to our friend for a while, we may feel guilty that we haven’t called. If we’ve skipped the gym for a few days, we may go back not out of desire, but fear of losing progress.

Perhaps, here, the biggest risk, at least for me, is a sense of internal obligation. If we start some project but don’t finish, we feel guilty. And we try to use that guilt to motivate us, in place of a missing intrinsic motivation. The blog post unpublished, the song not finished, the drawing class we dropped out of. These are all failures that weigh us down. And ironically, the weight of the guilt saps us of our intrinsic desires to do other things. And so we enter a rather vicious cycle of starting something new, losing momentum, getting distracted by old unfinished things, and feeling guilty.

But why should we feel guilty? If these active leisure activities are truly leisure, where does this obligation come from? If we wanted to do something, and did it for a while, and then lost interest in favour of something else, why is that bad? It feels like failure, but if the thing is only ever being done for its own sake, in what sense can we really fail?

It feels like failure, because we weren’t doing the thing for its own sake. Instead, we wanted to improve. We wanted to optimize. We wanted other people to see what we were doing and be impressed and think about what cool and virtuous people we are. We wanted to go pro.

We wanted to do the thing, not simply because we wanted to do the thing, but because we wanted to do it as a means to some other end. We wanted to improve, not simply because we enjoyed the thing and were excited to get better at it, but because we hoped that if we only were good enough at the thing, then we would finally be good enough for ourselves and all the people around us.

And so, to truly engage in active leisure, we may consider these as (at least) necessary conditions: a) we should have ample time and energy for activity outside our work; b) we should be meaningfully engaged in some thing, so as to find the intrinsic motivation to do some activity, rather than passively drift; and c) we must derive that motivation from the activity itself, rather than some end that we hope to achieve by means of the activity. Active leisure, while it may be fulfilling, cannot be a means to fulfillment.