A post written a few years ago, posting now during a time of irrelevance (as far as I know with my limited attention on politics or social media) so as not to be accidentally taking a side in any specific political debates.

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Alexandra What has happened is shocking and everyone should oppose it.
Beatrice I’m eating a sandwich. It is better than I expected.
Alexandra I can’t believe you would write about a sandwich at a time like this. Don’t you oppose what happened?
(Claire is excited by the breakfast bread discussion but guesses that contributing a picture of her bagel is pretty inappropriate and looks at SMBC instead.)

People break up their time into work and leisure. You might think of work vs. leisure as roughly ‘doing stuff because other people pay for it’ vs. ‘doing stuff because you want to’. You can also think of it as roughly ‘effortful’ vs. ‘relaxing’. Often these categories align—other people pay you to do effortful things, and the things you want to do are more relaxing. They don’t always align. Helping your aged relative go to the doctor might be effortful but a thing you do because you want to, or your job might be so easy that you come home with a bunch of energy for challenging tasks.

I’m going to call these ‘resting-‘ vs. ‘challenged-‘ and ‘-boss’ vs. ‘-employee’. So entirely free time is mostly resting-boss and paid work is usually challenged-employee. But you can also get resting-employee and challenged-boss activities. This all maybe relies on some models of rest and attention and effort and such that don’t work out, but they seem at least close the models that most people practically rely on. For whatever reason, most people prefer to spend a decent fraction of their time doing non-effortful things, unless something terrible will happen soon if they don’t.

People mostly use social media as leisure, both in the sense that nobody would intentionally pay them for it, and in the sense that it is not effortful. When important political things are happening, social media naturally turns to discussion of them. Which, if you are lucky, might be thoughtful analysis of world affairs, with a bunch of statistics and rethinking your assumptions and learning new facts about the world. Which is all great, but it is not leisure in the ‘not effort’ sense. When I need a break from researching the likely social consequences of artificial intelligence, moving...

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