Occidental Solitude

The weekend was created, through collective action and forward-looking legislation, to ease the burden of work. But look what’s happened to it. It has annexed leisure - what the Greeks called skholé, the root for school - into a form of consumption. We have reduced forms of play, like sports, to mass spectacles that offer reward for the past week’s work and rest for the coming one. Everything entails the production of consumption, with ourselves as the final product, consumed by our desires under the sign of the consumer. Not only is it obvious now that we can’t go on this way, it has been obvious all along.