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What It means to have Leisure Time in our Compulsive Culture?


Picture's Courtesy: Olson Kundig


"The modern life has brought a compulsive culture, whereas people are craving for the time of leisure with no avail".

This is a hypothesis which I intuitively believe in, but I would like to examine if a compulsive culture is a reality or not for the contemporary societies? And the second variable is to assume that people have craving for leisure time, like Sunday or any other holiday. On the first question, I would like to know what it means to say "compulsive culture".

Culture is all about sharing the values among the members of the community, in belief and its practices. There can't be a culture at the atomic behaviour of individual. It needs to be shared by society or at least a majority of its members to say if a culture exists or not. "Compulsive" has something to do with compulsion. Compulsion is an absence of freedom to exercise choices. It means non-existence of freedom. Freedom may be conceptualized as the ability to see things clearly and to reach upon the conclusion without having any epistemological bias. Freedom, in a sense, is knowledge. Knowledge is not about information, belief, dogma, image, or any name; it is the state of being which is empty of its essence, like an ego-less state of being, which is as good as non-being in the form of being. The accumulated false belief, information, or name is as good as mountainous burden, which imprisons and chains the human's heart, and deprives it from its unique ability to flow spontaneously like time or river.


Every accumulation is insecurity. Accumulated things have a limited period of existence. I am as a body is finite, dying many death each-day, without knowing how exactly I have changed and have been changing since childhood. Which picture is mine, if there is one single picture to represent me as a person? 


Do we find a general agreement among the members of the society, global, local, or glocal, to develop a pattern of accumulation unceasingly? If the anxiety of accumulation is as true as the existence of human's species, it means, there is a widespread sharing of value to compete and win the life success without any compromise whatsoever.  And there is always a loser in this game, disheartened and afraid from the progress or speed of others. The people of progress suffer from insecurity to maintain the speed, while keeping in mind the distance in which the adversary is situated in. The man of speed is more vulnerable than man of comfort. One has many things to protect and other one has nothing to gain or lose. Thus, to conclude, there is a compulsive culture, in which, people are moving with immense speed mechanically to move faster without any break, and to reach on the top, which doesn't exist as far as I have experienced, so as to feel lonely and meaningless there. Journey for such a person was never a time to reflect upon the speed of journey itself. And when it comes to reaching, the reached one is simply not satisfied with the goal. Goal was an image in the preliminary stage of life; in the course of journey, when the expectation is not met with. The image demands another image of progress to run the race continuously, like every step of the journey is the possibility of a new goal, which is ceaseless like a continuous chain of day and night. 


In such a culture, if one seriously stays with the question of self, nature, and other, and do not participate in the compulsive culture of amassing the material or psychic substances, only in that case, leisure as a virtue of good life, advocated by Aristotle, could be achieved. Not like a culture of compulsive holiday, for example,  Sunday, which is spent with full accelerator to extract each drop of unconscious pleasures, and thereafter, Monday is just like another stepping stone against freedom, knowledge, and towards unalienated life.

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