"Contrary to those critics of consumer society who fear that shorter working hours would create only more time for mindless consumption, thereby ensuring our further descent into commodity fetishism, there is reason to expect that if given more time, people will find ways to be creative-even if those ways do not necessarily conform to traditional notions of productive activity. Rather than simply a state of passivity, it is important to recognize the potential social productivity of nonwork. By this measure, the problem posed by an expansion of nonwork time is not, as E. P. Thompson notes, “‘how are people going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but `what will be the capacity of experience of the people who have this undirected time to live?”’ Perhaps if what Thompson calls the Puritan time-valuation were to relax, we could, as he speculated, “re-learn some of the arts of living"

Kathi Weeks (via wretchedoftheearth)