HERE’S A SCENE from a film or television show that you’ve almost certainly watched: little kids joyfully bomb a resort pool, the arc of their descent one long plea for their parents’ attention. They’re ignored because Dad or Mum, or both, are on the phone (or, latterly, Zoom), talking about spreadsheets in a business voice until an accidental, but definitely moralising, splash lands on their face or, ruinously, the laptop they’re anxiously scanning. Anger flashes, the kids are crestfallen, the other parent looks on despairingly; the holiday mood is soured. A variation: a group of reverent birdwatchers pad through the undergrowth, peering up into the forest canopy until the silence is shattered by a man shouting into, and then at, his phone. He storms off swearing, hand upthrust in a fruitless search for signal, while just behind him a fabled bird settles on a branch, unseen. In both cases, and in the multitude of variations on this theme (not all of which implicate the pernicious effects of technology), we witness the judgement – the shaming – of those who squander the gift of family, friendship or nature when it is cocooned from the invasive demands of the workplace. 

These corrective vignettes argue that leisure, properly appreciated, is a space of exemption from the impingements of the world. Of course, we know that isn’t the case for all sorts of reasons, not least of which that leisure is inevitably the product of someone else’s toil. That realisation, too, occasions further judgements on leisure’s uncritical consumers in all their environmentally ruinous and culturally insensitive enactments (see season one of White Lotus which, helpfully, anthologises versions of all the above examples). What I want to suggest here is that although shame appears to be the consequence of betraying leisure in the name of work, its regulatory function is – and always has been – intrinsic to the idea of leisure and its reformist potential.