We pick up a book group, a set of knitting needles, or a pickleball paddle looking for a clean break from the demands of the working day, only to find ourselves staring down a spreadsheet of quotas and milestones. In a recent installment of Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, Explain It to Me, writer Jenny Odell sat down to examine why contemporary leisure so often resembles a performance review.
The Protestant Work Ethic and the Birth of Optimized Leisure
Our cultural fixation on making every waking hour accountable to some form of progress is not a byproduct of the modern internet. According to historian Gary Cross, author of Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal, the impulse stretches back to the earliest American migrations. As Cross explained to Vox, early settlers largely carried a Protestant work ethic that viewed labor as a specialized calling from God.
That worldview shifted into high gear with industrialization. Capitalists treated time away from the production line as idle waste, a mindset that stubbornly survived the labor movement’s hard-won victories for free time around the turn of the 20th century. When workers finally carved out hours for personal pursuits, the old scoreboard mentality simply made the jump right alongside them.
Odell, whose books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock explore the heavy toll of perpetual intensity, noted that modern life leaves people feeling an exhausting, painful relationship with the clock. Hobbies, she argues, become a battleground where different philosophies of time collide.
“There’s a very fine line between someone who pursues a hobby for the sake of doing it versus someone who feels that they need to optimize it, perhaps even make money off of it,” Odell told the program.
Trading Progress Scores for Pure Experimentation
American culture rarely grants adults structured spaces to learn outside of professional development or formal education. When people seek out adult learning communities, that natural desire for forward movement gets hijacked by a wider societal demand to have tangible proof of output.
To break out of the quantification cycle, Odell suggests adopting tools from game theory. She points to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score, which explores how playing games allows people to temporarily slip into an artificial set of values before putting them away.
For her own writing, Odell catches herself tracking metrics like daily word counts, realizing that raw volume tells us nothing about substance. Deliberately injecting friction or seeking out activities where one is manifestly inept can short-circuit the perfectionist instinct.
“I feel like I am actively now seeking out things that I’m bad at just so I can have that feeling,” Odell said. “I’m a failure addict.”
Embracing Incompetence as a Radical Act
Modern visibility through social media has shrunk our tolerance for public mistakes, turning amateur pursuits into high-stakes displays. By contrast, embracing incompetence strips away ulterior motives and forces the participant to enjoy the activity purely for its own texture.
Odell offered her own ongoing participation in a native plant restoration project as an example. Showing up years ago without proper clothing, lacking gardening gloves, and knowing nothing about flora created a liberating contrast to the hyper-specialization of professional life.
To rehabilitate a stalled relationship with leisure, Odell recommends deliberately throwing obstacles in your own path—writing with your non-dominant hand, shifting contexts, or engaging unfamiliar groups—to relax the tight grip of optimization and let the joy of the unmeasured moment back in.
