Sabbatical fantasy world

Focused
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I didn’t realize this 2020 thread existed until after I posted my blog on the topic this morning. I was responding to a recent discussion on the Focused podcast.

It’s interesting to me that the confusion and difficulty in even defining the term ‘sabbatical’ hasn’t improved over the last four years, and may have become worse as more people develop their own unique definitions.To me this is additional evidence that it’s a term that needs to be replaced by something more clear, understandable, and applicable to more people.

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I enjoyed the article even if I disagree. Part of the appeal for me is seeing non traditional sabbatical takers expand use of the term, which makes me interested in the practice. Coming up I figured only those in science or education, for example, had a chance to pursue such a thing.

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The idea of taking a break from your work has existed long before creators started using the word ‘sabbatical,’ and I fail to see how using that word adds anything positive. Different ways and objectives of taking a break have likewise existed.

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“Known” meanings of the term Sabbaticals include Studying, travelling, and/or taking a period of rest. All would fall under your description of taking a break from work also.

The English language changes all of the time, and the meanings of words are often expanded beyond their original meaning.

Especially for something like this which is of massive benefit to people I don’t see that starting a semantic conversation about the meaning of the word brings any benefit, and is more likely to dissuade people from exploring the topic.

In the end, a sabbatical can be used for whatever you wish it to be, in the same way that the holiday I choose for myself, would likely be different to the holiday you would choose, but both are a holiday. I could take a sabbatical to write a book, spend a month reading all of my Discworld novels, go running from one end of the country to the other to test my stamina, or spend time planning to transition into a new career, it really doesn’t matter.

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If only Terry was still around to author create a sabbatical fantasy world with 40 more novels…GNU Terry Pratchett.

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What made me agree with @Jeagar52 was listening to Mike and David explain carefully that they thought a lot of the things I thought were sabbaticals were not.

In my experience (education) a sabbatical was a fixed time away from the business of normal work to dedicate to a project (e.g. writing up research into a book) as a means of self-development: the refreshment came via having time to work in a different, less frantic and maybe deeper way to develop your skills and understanding. The aim was either to return to your job with new perspectives and approaches or sometimes to prepare for a different job. That’s what justified the investment of time. R & R, family time, even “me time” (e.g. taking time each week to garden or make furniture) is just as essential but I’d never think of it as sabbatical.

It does matter what people call things, at least if you are trying to build up a shared understanding.

I also completely share David’s hesitation over allowing himself to take sabbaticals. Time is a limited and therefore precious resource. You can’t make more of it. When you have responsibilities, you simply have to use it so it will make the biggest impact on fulfilling those responsibilities. That use of time does need to be wise: taking some time off can absolutely be the best use of that time. for lots of reasons, but as he said recently on MPU planning in lots of “sabbaticals” when there were always likely to be competing demands on that time might not be wise: but nothing wrong in putting “I want to make more furniture by hand this year” higher up the priority list.

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I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks and was interested in learning that, before the Industrial Revolution, working all the time was looked down up, and life was the pursuit of leisure. And leisure was an activity without purpose; it wasn’t a side hustle or a money maker.

We have turned our engagement with our own time into a transaction. I don’t think it’s healthy.

I’ve been running my own business for 11 or 12 years now. I don’t agree necessarily with a sabbatical every 7 weeks or whatever; one must do what is right for them. But I also don’t agree it is necessary to spend the majority of my day working in some fashion. That seems the opposite of living.

I think, if one were to take a Sabbatical, to turn it to a “personal growth” opportunity would also be missing the point of leisure, at least in the original Latin sense of the word, where it means “no work.” It’d be better to treat your Sabbatical as a Sabbath, I think. They share the same root, after all.

I always find threads like this interesting, because our western culture is so obsessed with being productive all the time that I think we’re all miserable.

Four Thousand Weeks has a joke that I liked in it. It goes something like this: a New York City businessman meets a fisherman somewhere in Asia. The businessman asks the fisherman about his day. The fisherman says he fishes for a few hours a day, then drinks wine and relaxes in the sun with his friends. Appalled by this schedule, the businessman explains to the fisherman that he should really work much more. If only he worked full 8-12 hour days, he’d make enough money to buy more boats and hire people to fish in the boats for him. Then, after making his millions, he could one day retire.

“What would I do then?” asked the fisherman.

The businessman thinks for a moment, and then says “drink wine and relax in the sun with your friends.”

I don’t know if I’m actually contributing here, but life is short and we all must live it accordingly to our own best desires.

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For the vast majority of people before the industrial revolution, life was every bit as complicated as ours can be and often a lot tougher. They didn’t have a job or jobs for which they were paid, but a role within their family, village, social class etc., with very little opportunity to escape that destiny. They had a set of relationships and responsibilities (to God, the Church, the King, their Lord, their family) which defined what they had to do. There wasn’t a meaningful distinction between work and leisure. This meant that there also wasn’t much distinction between work and home, either. Weaving, brewing, farming, clothes-making etc. were integral to the home. By any reasonable standard, those people worked extraordinarily hard from dawn to dusk and in many ways had very little control over their activity levels, but some “leisure” was built in: Sundays, Saints Days and social expectations (e.g. the Lord would give a feast when harvest was gathered in)

The big changes that came with the agricultural and industrial revolutions were about making it impossible for work and home to be integrated: people had to go to the factory to work long hours for money to buy what they needed. It was (as it often had been) a story of (mostly) ruthless exploitation of the majority for the benefit of those who had capital. And it’s very complicated: the role of alcohol in working class “leisure” or the profound inequality between men and women in all classes or the role of trades unions and churches in improving the lot of the “poor” to give just a few examples.

I don’t think you can really say that people were better off or had more leisure before the industrial revolution. And isn’t “personal growth” the core of a worthwhile life?

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This is an intriguing discussion. I find this passage from the Republic to be pertinent. Although the discussion pertains to illness, attention to health, and its connection to virtue, if we replace “illness” with “sabbatical,” it is clear that the opportunity to take a sabbatical, regardless of how one defines it, is a privilege reserved for the well-to-do.

because he knew that in all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill.

This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously enough, do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.

How do you mean? he said. I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble. Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only. Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation? [emphasis added]

Note: I separated the text into paragraphs for easier reading.

Plato. 2021. The Republic. Classic Books by Kathartika.

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I don’t mean to imply that they were better off or that life was better before the Industrial Revolution. I merely mean to say that we viewed productivity and work and rest very differently then than we do now. I worry now that too much of the way we think about work and ourselves has been influenced by our corporate overlords.

As a simple example, I have a friend who feels guilty every time he plays Baldur’s Gate on his PlayStation because he’s not advancing his skill base for work. That’s not healthy. Some leisure is required.

Again, not advocating for sabbatical necessarily. Just saying that I’m not sure any leisure time needs to be spent on personal development in order for it to be nourishing. I think personal development is another term we’ve made up in the past 100 years. A sabbatical could probably be spent doing whatever one thinks is edifying and it would be totally fine.

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Exactly. Before the industrial revolution people didn’t really think about work and leisure, they just did what they had to do and grabbed as much fun and rest as they could. There’s a deep rabbit hole to explore around “the Protestant Work Ethic” and how it arose, but it’s so embedded in modern Western psychology that we don’t even recognise it.

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Yeah, I think we’re very much on the same page. Sorry if I confused you.

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While listening to the episode, the thought of a sabbatical made me think of the terms “waterfall” and “agile” in software development. In waterfall, a project is completely planned up front where agile is more iterative knowing everything inevitably changes.

For me personally, I would have a hard time thinking about everything about life/work on a quarterly weekend stay in a cabin. I do better with a more iterative weekly hike.