"Every time the sun rises,
I remember my brothers
who, without bread and with hardships
are going to start their work."
Augusto Ferrán.
The distribution of the working day is one of the factors that most finely and profoundly conditions a way of life. Getting up early or staying up late, eating at certain hours or others, gathering the working day in a first part of the day, to leave a margin free at the end, or making the work extend, less pressing and with breaks, from morning to night; all this reveals a dominant average pretension in a society, a repertoire of desire, an idea of what happy life is.
From the time he has -more or less quantified-, man makes two parts: the one he considers his own and the one that seems foreign to him, approximately, this division coincides with the one that Ortega introduced regarding occupations: laborious and felicitous. The time that each one "sells" to live is not "his"; it is the "alienated" time, alienated, which feels like lost; the "own" is the free rest, which can be used for whatever you want. In what proportion are they distributed in each society, in each way of life, in each class?
The man who gets up at dawn, rushes to his work, interrupts it for half an hour, an hour at most, to have a brief lunch, then strives to finish at five in the afternoon and have a fragment of the day exclusively his own, has a different texture than the one who prefers to stay in bed until it is well into the day, go home to have a slow and copious lunch, chat after the meal, perhaps take a little nap, return to the workplace again, finish it at night, without time to start any activity, but to walk, have an aperitif with some friends, attend a show.
How much free time does the average man of each group have in a given society? What does he invest it in? What does it seem like "wasting time" and what, on the contrary, taking advantage of it? These are the questions that must be answered in each case. And it must also be specified whether, in a specific era, this articulation of daily life that is in force responds to the authentic appetites of individuals, or whether they feel it as a collective imposition, as an organization that endures by inertia and that they would like to change. What is the sentimental place of official "diversions", of walking, of conversation, of doing nothing, but, perhaps, sunbathing? How many hours of solitude does the man have, how many does the woman have? What do play, reading, television, sports, gallantry represent? What is the place of boredom in a society? And this, where does it lead? Perhaps to do science, perhaps to earn money, perhaps to conspire, possibly to take it as the very condition of life. If we are honest, we will have to recognize that sociology and history do not allow us to sufficiently answer these questions to this day, for almost any society, not even about our own; and that without answering them we do not know what it has meant for those men to "live", much less to "be happy". And as the poet said: "For not wanting to waste time / you waste time and soul. / You are losing your life / from wanting to win it so much".
Francisco Arias Solis
