In 1948, the German philosopher Josef Pieper warned of a world of "total work," in which life is subsumed in labor and the capacity to enjoy genuine leisure goes into full retreat. That is where we stand today, and it did not happen overnight. In 1975, among married couples, 31 percent had both spouses working full time. Today, over half of these couples are punching in for over 40 hours each.
What is happening within the hours Americans are allegedly at rest? They’re dealing with “funflation". Often, the phenomenon is more often painted as evidence that the consumer is flush with cash. Bankrate's chief financial analyst Greg McBride called it a "devil-may-care" attitude in early 2025, in response to rising concert ticket prices for acts like Taylor Swift.
I've argued elsewhere that the shift in how Americans spend their free hours is partly the result of the positive, persistent inflation baked into the US economy. The labor-leisure tradeoff has tipped in favor of the former.
The arithmetic behind that tilt is unforgiving. Since January 2021, consumer prices have risen 28.1 percent. Average hourly earnings have risen 26.2 percent. The gap is nearly two percentage points, and no amount of nominal raises has closed it. After more than five years of running to stand still, households face demoralization. Entertainment has indeed become an increasingly expensive form of escapism.
Bank of America (BOA) recently reported that as of August 2026, price inflation hasn't just hit gas pumps and grocery stores. It's hitting hiking trails, hobby shops, and even young people who are "Nonnamaxxing" with traditional activities like knitting, crocheting, and cooking.
The pattern in the data is certainly an inflationary story, as prices have grown more quickly than purchases. Hobby spending grew 7.9 percent year-over-year; transactions grew only 3.4 percent. Growth in costs that outruns growth in transactions is evidence that price inflation has spread to the leisure sector.
It's not just the spending on pastimes that has changed. "Nonnamaxxers" aside, the nature of relaxation has also been transformed, especially among the young. The BOA report explained that Gen Z spends between 20 and 25 percent of available free time on their screens. When the young and the old are getting out, they are all facing a long-run pattern of increasing real costs. Sporting event admission has risen by 123 percent since 2000, against 87 percent for general inflation. Movies, theater performances, and concert tickets have also outpaced overall prices at a 105 percent clip. These aren't recent developments, but a quarter-century trend.
These consumption patterns and a price indices are intertwined with a broader cultural issue. Konrad Heiden, the German journalist who chronicled the Weimar Republic’s decadent culture, watched valuations shift in a similar way. He described "a cynical frivolity [that] penetrated men's souls; no one knew what he really possessed and some men wondered what they really were." Perhaps those profligate Germans were the forerunners of McBride's "devil-may-care" concert-goers.
The evidence that such a culture is emerging under these market conditions isn’t hard to find. In 2025, one in four Americans financed a concert or festival. Over that same span, "37% of Generation Z and 35% of millennials" reported using the loans for these purposes. Enjoying a fleeting experience and paying for it with interest in the future is far from a sign of prosperity. It looks like desperation masquerading as affluence.
Pieper argued that genuine leisure is not merely time off from labor. Rather, it's a unique human capacity. It can be eroded and practically disappear. The world of "total work" is one where rest becomes a task, merely to service later work. That future work will be needed to service the debts taken on to enjoy time off. This isn't a morality tale, it's what the numbers show. T
he federal time-use data show that the world of total work is upon us. Americans still have approximately five hours of leisure per day. What has changed is the atomized nature of what happens within those hours. The share of adults who socialize with others on a given day has dropped from 38 percent in 2015 to 30 percent ten years later. The time they spend with others also fell from 41 minutes to 35 per day.
Which brings the argument back to where it started. If a culture has lost the ability to produce leisure, it has to borrow against both its past and its future to manufacture it.
Pieper's claim was that leisure is the basis of culture. Taken at his word, and we are living through an era in which cultural artifacts are being consumed rather than produced with excellence.
Artists themselves have noted this cultural consumption. Critiques of "pastiche" music and films that rely on the cultural production of past works have faced not only legal challenges, but represent the depletion of past production to create half-baked and high-priced versions in the present day.
The kind of leisure that consumes irreplaceable, inimitable cultural icons is increasingly difficult to obtain and preserve. It speaks to both how leisure is produced and consumed. In an inflationary culture, more and lower quality culture is created and recreation is bought on credit, rather than accumulated savings.
As of August 2026, the US personal savings rate stood at 4.1 percent. Compared to the average of 8.3 percent since 1959, it's little wonder that a fatigued public, subject to total work, has to borrow to enjoy relaxation. Pieper's warnings have gone unheeded, and cultural consumption is the result.
