The Lost Art of Leisure

How we lost the Intrinsic to the Instrumental

The life of a peasant in the Middle Ages wasn’t easy. As Alain de Botton put it in his book Status Anxiety:

”They were poor, undernourished, cold, fearful and dead — usually following some agony — before their fortieth birthdays. After a lifetime of work their most expensive possession might have been a cow, a goat, or a pot. Famine had never been far aw…