In the epilogue, I offer a coda on the pursuit of leisure. While schools (teachers and administrators) can make strides toward cultivating leisure in students, the art of leisure is fundamentally a subjective task. It is learning how to be a person – how to live with and contend with the angels and demons that plague human existence.

To see how education can offer a space for contending with the ubiquitous problem of boredom, I first need to begin to define what boredom is and understand how it constitutes a “problem” for the pursuit of a flourishing life. The most vexing kind of boredom is what Heidegger describes as “existential boredom,” characterized by a disenchantment with life and a struggle to find meaning. In contrast to situational boredom, which ebbs and flows depending upon external conditions, existential boredom is often an enduring condition that, while affected by material conditions, is not reducible to them. Situational boredom points to a clear and immediate solution in some kind of action, while the cure for existential boredom is often unclear. Even more problematic, as I will argue, the avoidance of situational boredom intensifies existential boredom. The pervasive cures for situational boredom are the causes of existential boredom.

In this chapter, I consider the outlines of a pedagogy for leisure, offering examples that aim to show, more than tell, what a leisure-informed pedagogy looks like. While there is no surefire recipe or formula for leisure, certain parameters can help us cultivate leisure. The three guidelines outlined in the previous chapter – apprenticeship, study, and epiphany – are present in all three examples noted below, but each illustrates one particular guideline more prominently than the others.

In the spate of scholarship on boredom over the past two decades, the moral character of boredom has received little attention (Elpidorou, ). This is striking because boredom’s ancient precursor, acedia, was considered to be one of the deadliest vices and the source of several other destructive vices, including gluttony, lust, and anger (Bunge, ). In this respect, modern boredom arguably parallels acedia, as it is also casually linked to numerous problematic, arguably immoral behaviors. The state of boredom is morally significant because it adversely impacts both moral reasoning and the vision of flourishing that guides moral reasoning. Boredom is not simply a mood we must endure but a state of mind (certainly impacted by circumstances) that we need not be captive to. Its moral significance also needs to be underscored because there is something at stake: We can do something about what we find to be boring (boredom assessment) and how we contend with this mood state (boredom endurance).

In this chapter, I begin by considering Poet A – Kierkegaard’s compelling pseudonym who embodies how we usually understand and respond to this mood state. Poet A’s account reveals three key facets of boredom: the incessant striving of our voracious ego, the onset of existential fatigue, and our ever-resilient attempts to fend off boredom, seeking both to maximize freedom and maintain control. I then turn to Kierkegaard’s analysis in Sickness unto Death, penned by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Rather than understanding boredom as a neutral mood state that comes and goes, Anti-Climacus diagnoses it as laced with forms of despair that easily overtake us. When we maneuver to escape this kind of boredom, we only become further mired in it. Anti-Climacus’ framework illuminates and brings conceptual depth and insight to the two dominant boredom responses I noted in the introduction, avoidance and resignation.

In this book, I make a case that schools should graduate students who know how to engage boredom productively when it arises. Rather than simply avoiding boredom or helplessly blaming boredom on something or someone else, such students take responsibility for their boredom. They develop internal resources for contending with boredom; they are adept and diplomatic at challenging boring circumstances, and they are equipped at finding worthwhile activities and practices that alleviate boredom. Such students acquire a capacity to discern a creative middle way between boredom avoidance, on the one hand, and stultifying boredom endurance, on the other hand. This middle way, I will argue, is the practice of leisure.

In this chapter, I examine the dynamics of contemporary so-called leisure, which is largely how we attempt to ameliorate boredom. With contemporary leisure what appears to offer self-renewal and self-actualization actually advances a form of blissful self-obliteration that enables the despair that Kierkegaard alerts us to. I then turn to an alternative conception of leisure, which draws inspiration from classical sources. This tradition, which has evolved and developed in several cultural eras, traces a line from Aristotle to St. Benedict of Nursia to Thomas Aquinas up to more recent leisure visionaries, including Simone Weil and Josef Pieper. Rather than enhancing self-restoration, these writers contend, the vacancy and inaction of free time are prey to acedia – a spiritual and mental sloth. The classical leisure tradition takes direct aim at this tendency, cultivating practices of leisure which protect the self from falling into despair. The argument here is that contemporary leisure, as it is often understood and practiced, offers a temporary anesthetic that in the end intensifies existential boredom and despair. True leisure, by contrast, restores and renews the self, offering a powerful antidote to existential boredom and the despair that afflicts the self.

In this chapter, I first consider Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian notion of “practices.” For MacIntyre, practices refer to special forms of human activity that harbor what he calls internal goods, goods to which practitioners progressively gain access as they acquire more experience. Part of what it means to enact a leisurely state of mind is to become attentive to the internal goods of our practical engagements. At the same time, the activities in which we can cultivate and enact leisure should not only be thought of as “practices,” in the MacIntyrean sense. Attending only to such practices would narrow the range of human engagement in which leisure can be experienced. More provocative is the philosopher Albert Borgmann’s  notion of a focal practice, which resonates with MacIntyre’s account, but includes a broader range of activities that count as worthwhile practices. While Borgmann’s account of focal practices covers what MacIntyre has in mind, it also includes simple activities such as cooking, walking, and reading. Borgmann shows that even, and especially in such engagements, we can experience and further cultivate leisure. Drawing from both MacIntyre’s and Borgmann’s insights, I sketch out three tangible ways to cultivate leisure.