I was reading something about leisure and creativity, referencing the influential Margaret Mead and her own observations in cultural anthropology. It made great points on leisure and creativity, but I thought there might be something deeper to it.

Creativity, I think, might have an interesting parallel with intelligence within the Western framework, and because of the global economy is the global framework.

If we go with leisure and creativity being connected, we can assume those with less leisure would have less time to be creative. This goes hand in hand with pretty well accepted studies on how much intelligence is required to be poor. If you’re constantly wondering where that next meal is coming from, that can rob you of 13 IQ points.

I’m not a big fan of intelligence measurement for a variety of reasons, but it’s as good as we have until someone gets creative and thinks of something better. The point is, we use more intelligence toward our survival than leisure.

This makes sense following the theory of evolution, since we don’t see that many creatures on the planet with leisure other than us because we created these civilizations that centralize enough resources that if you follow the rules of the civilization, and are part of the group that civilization works for… you would have more leisure. Technology marketing is built on wanting more leisure, but civilization as it is demands productivity within that relatively new ‘leisure’. The last decade, the promise of more productivity builds on that implicit understanding that leisure comes from increased productivity.

It doesn’t always, does it?

That’s not a call for any form of ‘ism’ or ‘acy’, by the way, just an observation. If we didn’t require productivity to maintain the civilizations, we’d all be laying around sipping drinks and throwing paint at canvases while listening to the latest grooves.

We don’t.

Increasingly, we don’t spend as much time at leisure because we don’t have enough time outside of ‘being productive’.

Here’s a thought. Write down somewhere how much leisure time you had each day, where you and no one else demands anything from yourself. Measure that against time you spent being ‘productive’ with a tangible result, and compare the two.