"If nobody could see you, if you couldn’t post about it, would you still do it? If so, that’s neo-leisure. If not, it’s unpaid labour, the performance of joy for an invisible audience." - Nailed it 👏🏻
I agree with a lot of this, but I also wonder if we’re missing a quieter middle ground. For many people, the move away from optimisation isn’t about performing ease or “wasting time beautifully”, it’s about recovery. After years of pushing productivity to its limits, pulling back can be less about status or resistance and more about restoring balance and basic capacity. Not il dolce far niente... just recalibration.
I was going to leave this on your first installment but perhaps it belongs better here under your brilliant quote about unpaid labour.
I think that when I see posts that are really curated, or posts that are supposed to show someone as having expensive things or staying on yachts and what not, it signals that 1) this is not normal for the person posting 2) they’re focused on the image rather than the experience. So 3) they’re probably a bore to be around.
Once you fly first class often enough, once you have your watches and whatnot, it’s kind of a chore to take out your phone to take a picture… for people you don’t know…? Right? Or for people who have zero stakes in your life. The people in your life already know you’re living well. What’s the point of advertising this?
It’s different if the content of a post is something genuinely amusing, funny, interesting. Yet even then, if it might be perceived by some as being overly ostentatious one might not even post it.
But posing for a photo like you’re sponsored by the airline or the restaurant or the brand is… well, quite a lot of effort for somebody who has nothing to gain from doing so. And if one is living that life, doing so signals a deep insecurity. Which is a chink in the armour that can be exploited. (This is something a lot of women who marry into money don’t understand). And so in your mind, they do kind of just become less interesting.
And I think this is why many quietly wealthy people don’t do it. So I think being “offline” has always been the sign of real status.
Totally agree with your point that “ease” today is starting to function like status. In this economy, the ability to be unhurried, unavailable, and still fine financially is a kind of quiet flex now because most people can’t opt out of the grind even if they want to.
What’s interesting to me is how Gen Z collides with that reality - they grew up in peak hustle culture online, yet they also seem more willing to push back on the "always-on version of ambition". And it doesn’t read to me like laziness, more like a refusal to let the job swallow the rest of life, especially in a culture that treats constant busyness like virtue. At the same time they’re probably the most vulnerable to the “leisure optimization” trap you mentioned.
When they land in workplaces (especially finance, corporate law etc) where the deal is still pretty old-school capitalism: grind first, rewards later, high expectations, plus the renewed push to be in-office..it’s not surprising burnout feels so loud these days.
Do you think this creates a real cultural shift over the next decade or does the system eventually train people into the same rhythm once bills and responsibility stack up (capitalism wins)? I’m in my late 20s and can feel both sides of it, curious where you think the middle ground lands?
This is so on point, I wrote about this last week but from the creatives point of view and how this optimisation trap has killed our creativity... We are constantly sold the idea that our minds are machines, like a software that can be upgraded, debugged, and “hacked” for maximum output wile we are loosing touch with what it really means to be human. https://shadowincolor.substack.com/p/why-creativity-cannot-be-hacked-only
This sentence hits hard: "If the answer involves anyone’s perception but your own, you’re still performing." in this digital world we forget what it is to detox, to get bored to do things non-related to technology, and it's sad that we've almost forgotten how to be fully present without remembering oh I should take a picture of this, or I should Google this or wait I'll show you something on my phone. A balanced life with work and leisure well separated is getting harder because sometimes work becomes a passion but then the lines are blurred. We tend to forget when we're working or when we're having fun so we're constantly brainstorming ideas and things. It isn't a bad thing at all but letting our brains take a break and sorely focus on one thing or the other is very important too. That's how we'll achieve rest. I feel we don't even know how to rest anymore! Most rest involves scrolling nowadays. But our brain is not at rest. It's constantly absorbing content. I fell that it's when we're children that we know how to rest, at least at the time when there was fewer technology. I remember when I was living in Italy as a child, and still today when I went there recently, the Italians have the "dolce far niente" ingrained in their lifestyles. Morning coffees in bars, coffee shops or terraces outside in good weather, just them chatting away about life, fun, gossip, anything really. And just taking their sweet time to do that - especially in the mornings before work or during their "aperitivo" at around 6pm ish before dinner. It's beautiful to have moments where we can just forget about time and really live in the present moment. We forget about responsibilities and stop overthinking for a bit. Surely all of us needs to master scheduling detox days and just take some time off without thinking about work and responsibilities at all. It's really lovely to also see how different cultures view time! (Monochromatic and polychromatic) I mentioned that a bit in one of my posts about intercultural group work/ leadership. Every culture can learn about one another!
Unstructured time, otherwise known as slowness, is arguably one of the most important unlockers for long-term progress we have. Just wrapped up a research project entitled The Future of Slowness: https://mutantfutures.substack.com/t/the-future-of-slowness
This makes me question everything. Of course I’ve known for a while that people are copying influencers in posting aesthetic pictures and videos of their leisure. In a way, showing off by showing pictures or talking about your leisure is nothing new, but the way it’s being commodified by social media algorithms now is insidious. I’ve never liked wasting time with skincare routines, but I can see how elaborate dining experiences and even meditation can be performative. That makes me also think of more traditional religious activities as being performative—nothing new—as a form of cultural capital if not monetary capital. Nowadays the ease with which we document our lives has turned it into a panopticon, so at every moment we feel the need to perform. This goes hand in hand with the first status symbol of privacy.
I feel I mostly do things that I actually want to do, but I also feel the need to document the things I did. I like cooking, and it actually is a bit annoying to stop and take pictures of the process, but I do it anyway because I like to post pictures as a brag or as a way to prove that I actually did cook something from scratch. I’ve heard arguments that say that taking pictures captures a moment, like a mini-moment of appreciation when you really look at something before you snap the picture, but they can also detract. I had a Chinese New Year dinner with friends recently. I dressed up myself and my daughters in new clothes and served several homemade dishes. I did not take any pictures. I really enjoyed the experience, but part of me also feels like I missed out on not at least taking a mother-daughter picture. The time wasn’t wasted, but it seemed like an opportunity was missed.
So can I “waste” my time without performing it? Who is going to judge if I spend my time scrolling instead of reading novels? Eating junk food instead of cooking complicated meals from scratch? Myself, I guess, but maybe that’s internalized productivity at work.
Eugene, I challenge the fact that wasting time = leisure. There should definitely be a boredom moment in all this to really call it wasting time. I think the neo-leisure category is still partly entertainment and enjoyment, which can't be considered as wasting time. Maybe eating time.
Also, the romanticized Italian dolce far niente is the sanctuary of boredom, of yawns, let's be honest.
If you never perform (especially for the first time) you’ll never know if you truly enjoy it. You should try it, even if you feel like you're performing. After all, everyone has been performing since the dawn of humanity. It’s a way to discover yourself and even find a new passion or hobby. Let’s all do a performative reading of Erving Goffman and Jia Tolentino!
I really like the idea of "the commodification of ease".
It always makes me think about the Italian word sprezzatura. I see it everywhere: parties where hosts spend hours and hours to design the best environment, the effortlessness of a 1-hr long makeup. But the reality tho. I guess luxury owns ease, and the wannabes perform sprezzatura.
"Thorstein Veblen argued that people signal wealth through conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, and conspicuous leisure. Had he lived into the 21st century, he might have added a fourth: conspicuous grinding. The performance of perpetual productivity. Capitalism convinced us this is what rich people actually do. It isn’t."
It goes even deeper. Racism first emerged as the aristocracy's bulwark against the plebs wanting equal rights, and they argued that they were deserving of their privileges because they were simply a different, more superior race.
So it's the ruling class that conjures these ideologies for the reasons of self-defense.
The rich today are deserving of their riches because they grind more. Or in the case of what's coming out of Silicon Valley, it's because they're on another level of intelligence.
It just so happens that today the dissemination of this idea is that of mimicry through social media where one can get rich enough by performing it successfully, creating a self-perpetuating myth cycle for the true believers.
"So yes, have that wine with friends. Bake bread for no reason. Listen to an album without shuffling. But ask yourself why you’re doing it. If the answer involves anyone’s perception but your own, you’re still performing."
Hmmm. The nature of human relationships is relational. We never do anything free from the perception of others. That perception is sometimes obviously external, but can also be and is internalized as well through socialization.
This status symbol sells the lie that the opposite is possible and that there are people doing it. However like all status symbols the truth stands with this one as well - the luxury they are trying to sell is in fact just an illusion. They are all optimising it. Otherwise it wouldn't be a status symbol which has no purpose if not communicated to anyone else's perception.
I think the whole point is that social relationships have become performative and that this necessity to perform (document / share / brag) for social proof and signalling – encouraged by social media and brands - has killed the sheer enjoyment of doing things for oneself (alone or with a group of people) or with object, products etc. Luxury brands by adopting become commoditized and lose their exclusivity and magic. If one buys a luxury item for social proof, they miss on the unique experience, care and craft that this item is meant to deliver. By not documenting / sharing / signalling, we can waste time actually enjoying the experience, item etc. and that becomes true luxury in an ever optimized world. It does not mean that the experience is to be enjoyed selfishly and in isolation. It can be shared afterwards but first it needs to be lived.
I mean for the most part I do agree with you. The point I wanted to make, but probably failed to, was that social relationships have not become performative, they have always been that, only the medium for the performance has changed. Today social media capitalizes massively on that performativity and I do agree even reduces a lot of things only to an act of performance.
On the one hand, I want to acknowledge that this form of luxury is for those who can live that way still just an illusion because if it weren't they wouldn't need to signal to the rest of us that they are doing it.
On the other I want to show compassion for those to whom this lifestyle is inaccessible but who try to emulate it through social media even though it is not a "pure" experience because life is hard and sometimes when we do this we try to engage in our own little fantasy of what it would be like if we could live that way. It doesn't mean everything is necessarily reduced to performance, just that maybe people try to give that performance a function in their lives.
"If nobody could see you, if you couldn’t post about it, would you still do it? If so, that’s neo-leisure. If not, it’s unpaid labour, the performance of joy for an invisible audience." - Nailed it 👏🏻
I agree with a lot of this, but I also wonder if we’re missing a quieter middle ground. For many people, the move away from optimisation isn’t about performing ease or “wasting time beautifully”, it’s about recovery. After years of pushing productivity to its limits, pulling back can be less about status or resistance and more about restoring balance and basic capacity. Not il dolce far niente... just recalibration.
I was going to leave this on your first installment but perhaps it belongs better here under your brilliant quote about unpaid labour.
I think that when I see posts that are really curated, or posts that are supposed to show someone as having expensive things or staying on yachts and what not, it signals that 1) this is not normal for the person posting 2) they’re focused on the image rather than the experience. So 3) they’re probably a bore to be around.
Once you fly first class often enough, once you have your watches and whatnot, it’s kind of a chore to take out your phone to take a picture… for people you don’t know…? Right? Or for people who have zero stakes in your life. The people in your life already know you’re living well. What’s the point of advertising this?
It’s different if the content of a post is something genuinely amusing, funny, interesting. Yet even then, if it might be perceived by some as being overly ostentatious one might not even post it.
But posing for a photo like you’re sponsored by the airline or the restaurant or the brand is… well, quite a lot of effort for somebody who has nothing to gain from doing so. And if one is living that life, doing so signals a deep insecurity. Which is a chink in the armour that can be exploited. (This is something a lot of women who marry into money don’t understand). And so in your mind, they do kind of just become less interesting.
And I think this is why many quietly wealthy people don’t do it. So I think being “offline” has always been the sign of real status.
Totally agree with your point that “ease” today is starting to function like status. In this economy, the ability to be unhurried, unavailable, and still fine financially is a kind of quiet flex now because most people can’t opt out of the grind even if they want to.
What’s interesting to me is how Gen Z collides with that reality - they grew up in peak hustle culture online, yet they also seem more willing to push back on the "always-on version of ambition". And it doesn’t read to me like laziness, more like a refusal to let the job swallow the rest of life, especially in a culture that treats constant busyness like virtue. At the same time they’re probably the most vulnerable to the “leisure optimization” trap you mentioned.
When they land in workplaces (especially finance, corporate law etc) where the deal is still pretty old-school capitalism: grind first, rewards later, high expectations, plus the renewed push to be in-office..it’s not surprising burnout feels so loud these days.
Do you think this creates a real cultural shift over the next decade or does the system eventually train people into the same rhythm once bills and responsibility stack up (capitalism wins)? I’m in my late 20s and can feel both sides of it, curious where you think the middle ground lands?
This is so on point, I wrote about this last week but from the creatives point of view and how this optimisation trap has killed our creativity... We are constantly sold the idea that our minds are machines, like a software that can be upgraded, debugged, and “hacked” for maximum output wile we are loosing touch with what it really means to be human. https://shadowincolor.substack.com/p/why-creativity-cannot-be-hacked-only
This sentence hits hard: "If the answer involves anyone’s perception but your own, you’re still performing." in this digital world we forget what it is to detox, to get bored to do things non-related to technology, and it's sad that we've almost forgotten how to be fully present without remembering oh I should take a picture of this, or I should Google this or wait I'll show you something on my phone. A balanced life with work and leisure well separated is getting harder because sometimes work becomes a passion but then the lines are blurred. We tend to forget when we're working or when we're having fun so we're constantly brainstorming ideas and things. It isn't a bad thing at all but letting our brains take a break and sorely focus on one thing or the other is very important too. That's how we'll achieve rest. I feel we don't even know how to rest anymore! Most rest involves scrolling nowadays. But our brain is not at rest. It's constantly absorbing content. I fell that it's when we're children that we know how to rest, at least at the time when there was fewer technology. I remember when I was living in Italy as a child, and still today when I went there recently, the Italians have the "dolce far niente" ingrained in their lifestyles. Morning coffees in bars, coffee shops or terraces outside in good weather, just them chatting away about life, fun, gossip, anything really. And just taking their sweet time to do that - especially in the mornings before work or during their "aperitivo" at around 6pm ish before dinner. It's beautiful to have moments where we can just forget about time and really live in the present moment. We forget about responsibilities and stop overthinking for a bit. Surely all of us needs to master scheduling detox days and just take some time off without thinking about work and responsibilities at all. It's really lovely to also see how different cultures view time! (Monochromatic and polychromatic) I mentioned that a bit in one of my posts about intercultural group work/ leadership. Every culture can learn about one another!
Unstructured time, otherwise known as slowness, is arguably one of the most important unlockers for long-term progress we have. Just wrapped up a research project entitled The Future of Slowness: https://mutantfutures.substack.com/t/the-future-of-slowness
This makes me question everything. Of course I’ve known for a while that people are copying influencers in posting aesthetic pictures and videos of their leisure. In a way, showing off by showing pictures or talking about your leisure is nothing new, but the way it’s being commodified by social media algorithms now is insidious. I’ve never liked wasting time with skincare routines, but I can see how elaborate dining experiences and even meditation can be performative. That makes me also think of more traditional religious activities as being performative—nothing new—as a form of cultural capital if not monetary capital. Nowadays the ease with which we document our lives has turned it into a panopticon, so at every moment we feel the need to perform. This goes hand in hand with the first status symbol of privacy.
I feel I mostly do things that I actually want to do, but I also feel the need to document the things I did. I like cooking, and it actually is a bit annoying to stop and take pictures of the process, but I do it anyway because I like to post pictures as a brag or as a way to prove that I actually did cook something from scratch. I’ve heard arguments that say that taking pictures captures a moment, like a mini-moment of appreciation when you really look at something before you snap the picture, but they can also detract. I had a Chinese New Year dinner with friends recently. I dressed up myself and my daughters in new clothes and served several homemade dishes. I did not take any pictures. I really enjoyed the experience, but part of me also feels like I missed out on not at least taking a mother-daughter picture. The time wasn’t wasted, but it seemed like an opportunity was missed.
So can I “waste” my time without performing it? Who is going to judge if I spend my time scrolling instead of reading novels? Eating junk food instead of cooking complicated meals from scratch? Myself, I guess, but maybe that’s internalized productivity at work.
Oof! This was too good. Loving your thoughtful pieces, especially this new Substack series.
you are genuinely my favourite thing about this app at the moment. I love this take
Eugene, I challenge the fact that wasting time = leisure. There should definitely be a boredom moment in all this to really call it wasting time. I think the neo-leisure category is still partly entertainment and enjoyment, which can't be considered as wasting time. Maybe eating time.
Also, the romanticized Italian dolce far niente is the sanctuary of boredom, of yawns, let's be honest.
If you never perform (especially for the first time) you’ll never know if you truly enjoy it. You should try it, even if you feel like you're performing. After all, everyone has been performing since the dawn of humanity. It’s a way to discover yourself and even find a new passion or hobby. Let’s all do a performative reading of Erving Goffman and Jia Tolentino!
Almost shared it on stories and then remembered not to.
I really like the idea of "the commodification of ease".
It always makes me think about the Italian word sprezzatura. I see it everywhere: parties where hosts spend hours and hours to design the best environment, the effortlessness of a 1-hr long makeup. But the reality tho. I guess luxury owns ease, and the wannabes perform sprezzatura.
"Thorstein Veblen argued that people signal wealth through conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, and conspicuous leisure. Had he lived into the 21st century, he might have added a fourth: conspicuous grinding. The performance of perpetual productivity. Capitalism convinced us this is what rich people actually do. It isn’t."
It goes even deeper. Racism first emerged as the aristocracy's bulwark against the plebs wanting equal rights, and they argued that they were deserving of their privileges because they were simply a different, more superior race.
So it's the ruling class that conjures these ideologies for the reasons of self-defense.
The rich today are deserving of their riches because they grind more. Or in the case of what's coming out of Silicon Valley, it's because they're on another level of intelligence.
It just so happens that today the dissemination of this idea is that of mimicry through social media where one can get rich enough by performing it successfully, creating a self-perpetuating myth cycle for the true believers.
"So yes, have that wine with friends. Bake bread for no reason. Listen to an album without shuffling. But ask yourself why you’re doing it. If the answer involves anyone’s perception but your own, you’re still performing."
Hmmm. The nature of human relationships is relational. We never do anything free from the perception of others. That perception is sometimes obviously external, but can also be and is internalized as well through socialization.
This status symbol sells the lie that the opposite is possible and that there are people doing it. However like all status symbols the truth stands with this one as well - the luxury they are trying to sell is in fact just an illusion. They are all optimising it. Otherwise it wouldn't be a status symbol which has no purpose if not communicated to anyone else's perception.
I think the whole point is that social relationships have become performative and that this necessity to perform (document / share / brag) for social proof and signalling – encouraged by social media and brands - has killed the sheer enjoyment of doing things for oneself (alone or with a group of people) or with object, products etc. Luxury brands by adopting become commoditized and lose their exclusivity and magic. If one buys a luxury item for social proof, they miss on the unique experience, care and craft that this item is meant to deliver. By not documenting / sharing / signalling, we can waste time actually enjoying the experience, item etc. and that becomes true luxury in an ever optimized world. It does not mean that the experience is to be enjoyed selfishly and in isolation. It can be shared afterwards but first it needs to be lived.
I mean for the most part I do agree with you. The point I wanted to make, but probably failed to, was that social relationships have not become performative, they have always been that, only the medium for the performance has changed. Today social media capitalizes massively on that performativity and I do agree even reduces a lot of things only to an act of performance.
On the one hand, I want to acknowledge that this form of luxury is for those who can live that way still just an illusion because if it weren't they wouldn't need to signal to the rest of us that they are doing it.
On the other I want to show compassion for those to whom this lifestyle is inaccessible but who try to emulate it through social media even though it is not a "pure" experience because life is hard and sometimes when we do this we try to engage in our own little fantasy of what it would be like if we could live that way. It doesn't mean everything is necessarily reduced to performance, just that maybe people try to give that performance a function in their lives.