For the Ancient Greeks, the Good Life depended on how you could use your time. Their idea of time differed from modern thinking. They divided it into four categories. They distinguished between labour, activities done for pay or as a slave, which they avoided, and work, activities done around the home, in philia (civic friendship), associated with care, craftsmanship and creativity. And they distinguished between recreation, mainly physical activities, sport and participating in drama, from which they learned the values of empathy and compassion, and leisure or schole, the combination of participation in public political life and education, in the broad civilising sense of the term.

Progress was measured in how much time could be devoted to schole, particularly public action in the agora, the commons, in which citizens could forge morality and the capacity to be political. Vitally, it was recognised that this required deliberation and learning. A special place was also given to what Aristotle called aergia, idleness, regarded as vital for contemplation.

Today’s way of looking at time is a far cry from all that. The rot began in the way work was reinterpreted over the ages. For the 18^th century Physiocrats, only agricultural labour counted as productive work. For Immanuel Kant, anybody doing what we call ‘services’ was unfit to be a citizen. For Adam Smith, the father of economics, services in general were unproductive. By the 20^th century, the silliness reached new heights. Only labour done for income was counted as work, and only labour boosted economic growth, which became the yardstick of progress.

The rot began in the way work was reinterpreted over the ages.

So, literally, the work most women do more than any other, that of caring for their children or other relatives, ceased to be work. For the Ancient Greeks that would have been seen as odd. So, if a man hired a woman as a housekeeper, economic growth and employment went up – progress was made. If they married, and she continued to do the same ‘work’, economic growth shrunk. Our national income statistics continue this nonsense to this day.

What happened to the idea of leisure is no less odd. The distinction between recreation and leisure has been lost. Both are needed for a Good Life, but the distinction is vital. Journalist Paul Mason recently wrote that ‘hours of work’ had declined since 1945 and so hours of leisure had increased by the same amount. Using the Greek concepts, that is profoundly erroneous. Many more people are paid for less time in labour, which is what is counted in official statistics, but must do more work-for-labour (on and off workplaces) and work-for-reproduction (retraining, etc), which are not measured in those statistics.

If unemployed or on the margins of the labour market, you must also do a lot of work, filling forms, queuing, job-searching, and attending numerous interviews to establish entitlement for benefits. That is scarcely leisure; it is work. But if they do not do it, they are branded as idle or lazy, which contrary to how the Greeks saw it, is regarded by our modern moralists as a sin.

Most people use less time thinking deeply about political matters, and it shows in reactions to political sound bites that tug on emotion rather than reasoning.