24 hours. Once given, never returned
Before starting at Ave Maria University, all freshman were required to read Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper. It has had a continued impact on how I view leisure and work as a professional now, giving both richer context.
We spend our lives in hours: the average American sleeps about nine hours a day, works between five and eight, and fills the rest with family, chores, and screens. But the deeper question is not how much time we spend — it’s what kind of life our time makes possible. Josef Pieper argued that culture itself is born from how we use our time. If that’s true, then the way we structure our days is not merely personal; it’s civilizational.
Most adults sleep roughly eight hours per day and work eight on average across the population according to the bureau of labor statistics. These two anchors — rest and labor — shape the rhythm of modern life. But Pieper would say they are not enough. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he insists that a healthy society is not built on work alone, but on the space that surrounds it: leisure, contemplation, worship, and the freedom to receive reality rather than constantly produce.
Who we are is revealed in the hours between sleep and work. Family dinners, prayer, silence, reading, play, and the never-ending screentime. Pieper warns that when a society becomes dominated by total work, even rest becomes utilitarian: we sleep only to work better, we recreate only to recover productivity, and we lose the capacity for wonder. A culture that forgets leisure forgets how to be human.
Modern life tempts us to divide everything into boxes: work here, faith there, family squeezed in the margins. But integration asks a different question: What if the whole of life is meant to be ordered toward what is highest? Pieper describes leisure as “an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul” — a posture of receptivity that allows truth, beauty, and God to break in. Integration means arranging our time so that work serves our vocation, rest restores our humanity, and relationships are not afterthoughts but the heart of our days.
Time is cumulative. A weekly holy hour, a nightly family meal, a Sabbath truly kept — these shape not only our interior life but the culture we hand on. Pieper’s insight is piercing: a society that loses leisure loses worship, and a society that loses worship loses its culture.
Whether you live in a small town like Ann Arbor or a major city, the arithmetic is the same: 24 hours, once given, never returned. In Pieper’s vision, culture begins when we allow time to open into eternity. And that begins with the way we live today. Nunc Coepi!
STEPHEN M. HENLEY
president of Legatus
We spend our lives in hours: the average American sleeps about nine hours a day, works between five and eight, and fills the rest with family, chores, and screens. But the deeper question is not how much time we spend — it’s what kind of life our time makes possible. Josef Pieper argued that culture itself is born from how we use our time. If that’s true, then the way we structure our days is not merely personal; it’s civilizational.
Most adults sleep roughly eight hours per day and work eight on average across the population according to the bureau of labor statistics. These two anchors — rest and labor — shape the rhythm of modern life. But Pieper would say they are not enough. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he insists that a healthy society is not built on work alone, but on the space that surrounds it: leisure, contemplation, worship, and the freedom to receive reality rather than constantly produce.
Who we are is revealed in the hours between sleep and work. Family dinners, prayer, silence, reading, play, and the never-ending screentime. Pieper warns that when a society becomes dominated by total work, even rest becomes utilitarian: we sleep only to work better, we recreate only to recover productivity, and we lose the capacity for wonder. A culture that forgets leisure forgets how to be human.
Modern life tempts us to divide everything into boxes: work here, faith there, family squeezed in the margins. But integration asks a different question: What if the whole of life is meant to be ordered toward what is highest? Pieper describes leisure as “an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul” — a posture of receptivity that allows truth, beauty, and God to break in. Integration means arranging our time so that work serves our vocation, rest restores our humanity, and relationships are not afterthoughts but the heart of our days.
Time is cumulative. A weekly holy hour, a nightly family meal, a Sabbath truly kept — these shape not only our interior life but the culture we hand on. Pieper’s insight is piercing: a society that loses leisure loses worship, and a society that loses worship loses its culture.
Whether you live in a small town like Ann Arbor or a major city, the arithmetic is the same: 24 hours, once given, never returned. In Pieper’s vision, culture begins when we allow time to open into eternity. And that begins with the way we live today. Nunc Coepi!
STEPHEN M. HENLEY
president of Legatus