## Metadata - Author: [[Janan Ganesh]] - Full Title:: The Tragedy of Leisure - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/ab241797-62d9-496d-b9e7-b74ed9303ef9?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email - Read date:: [[2026-04-30]] ## Highlights > A lot will then hinge on how a species wired for scarcity takes to unprecedented comfort. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqd9c42dbqq3ty6b0v98x5qp)) > In a low-stress life, the little stress that does occur is all the harder to accept. Hence our hair-trigger reaction to governmental failures that our grandparents would have shrugged off. Also: leisure allows more time for the mind to wander down undesirable corridors. The internet has a few. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqd9d5tc3gx00ej19eyc7dht)) > The result, and there is no unprovable political hunch of which I am more convinced, is modern populism. It is a movement born of ease, not just of pain. If it were otherwise, a reaction to elite incompetence and folk being “let down”, it should have erupted in the mid-20th century, amid the devaluations, the botched conscript wars, the exodus from great cities. > Instead, it took off during a time of low inflation, falling crime and tech-enabled convenience. A movement that can huff and puff about “western civilisation” is tacitly conceding that a lot of earthly demands have been met. It is not just liberalism that can be described as a set of luxury beliefs. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqd9f9j62ktf62tvzmjsza5b)) > With all those liberated hours, perhaps people will throw themselves into intellectual self-cultivation and companionship. It is just that we have the evidence from several decades in which leisure has been spreading. We did not all become Montaigne. Some became paranoid, or just over-political. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqd9gdwj3mjr9qr3t7eq6f7h)) > I sense that most people are not conscious of how leisure trips them up. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kqd9h6mqqz4ftkfnedj8yqx9))