The Wild Love of Leisure
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tuesday-Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon events. 3 hours.
Making Friends Like Our Lives Depend on It (Because It Does) w/ Visakan Veerasamy. February 25th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp* w/ A.J. Bond. Every Thursday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Zen Embodiment w/ Corey Hess. February 25th @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Stealing the Culture With Clubhouse w/ Peter Limberg, Tyson Wagner, and Michael Sillion. February 27th @ 6:00 PM ET. Clubhouse event.
*This will be A.J.’s last Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp. Join us as we celebrate our Shame Educator and the epic run he had at The Stoa!
***
February 24, 2021
A lightness is here. It is nice. Newness is also in the air. That is also nice.
I had something cool to write about today, but I forgot what it was. I am writing in the evenings now, because I have arranged my schedule differently, and my mornings are now deployed to getting shit done via the Stoic Hustle psychotechnology.
I am getting more shit done, administratively speaking, which does feel good, but I miss writing in the mornings. There is a sense of timelessness then, when I sleepily make an espresso, and write without knowing what will emerge. I agree with Josef Pieper that leisure is needed to philosophize well, he even argued that it is the foundation of culture. Pieper defines leisure as: an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.
More from Pieper: Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go . . .
So much fucking yes to this. If we are going to steal/seduce/heal this culture, we need some of this sweet leisure. For me, a sense of timelessness is associated with leisure, and it also has this for-its-own-sake quality. What one does with leisure does have an intrinsic quality about it. I always felt the intrinsic versus instrumental divide in moral philosophy was a clean one. Hustling has an instrumental quality about it. You are hustling to get something.
Hustling is like the opposite of leisure. Reality has a different ontological taste when I am in getting shit done hustle mode compared to when I am in my “ta eis heauton” journaling mode. The former is about imposing my will on what is, while the latter is about being with what is, so I can commune with what is.
I keep writing about this daemon thing. I actually get self-conscious about that. It is just a word though, one that I choose (or one that chose me) to explain this ontological taste of realness. I am actually listening to a song called Real right now, by Juan Wauters and Mac DeMarco. It just came on, and it starts with this epic line:
My love must be a kind of wild love.
Fuck yeah, eh. Wild love. That is what leisure affords. And the daemon comes out to play, asking you to taste the realness when leisure is really here, and it feels so lovingly wild.
I mentioned the following to a conversational partner in my coaching practice: you cannot trick this thing. Being in the right relationship with the daemon—aka being in eudaemonia—is not trying to trick the daemon, or trying to instrumentalize him towards making money, gaining status, or becoming more powerful.
Shit does not work like that, or at least I do not think it does. It works like this: carve out a sacred space, one with leisure baked in, then start becoming intimate with reality. You will then be visited by a wild love.
***
Support stealing the culture: patreon.com/the_stoa
Receive coaching from Peter and other facilitators at The Stoa: thestoa.ca/coaches