The biblical story of an earthly paradise in the Garden of Eden presents a picture of human life devoid of the necessity of labor or toil. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden as punishment for Adam's sin of disobedience carried with it the dire penalty of toil. The Lord God said to man: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life ... In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return into the ground."

There are secular myths, both ancient and modern, that also picture a golden age in the past when everything needed for the support of life existed in profusion and the human race could nourish and enjoy itself without the pain of toil. In all these accounts, toil is regarded as an affliction, as stultifying drudgery, as a crushing burden that deforms human life.

If there is no distinction between toil and work, we are led to ask: How would human beings spend their time if their lives were exempt from toil? Doing no work of any kind, what would they do with the time of their lives?

One answer will occur to everyone immediately. At least some portion of their time they would have to spend in sleep. But sleep is a recourse to inactivity for the purpose of refreshing the energies needed to engage in activities of one sort or another. In addition to sleeping, what else would human beings have to spend time on? Activities that serve the same purpose that the inactivity of slumbering does. Eating and drinking refuel the body's energies as sleep refreshes them. Cleansing the body, eliminating its wastes, and exercising its muscles all serve the same biological purposes -- health, vitality, and vigor.

There is no single word in our vocabulary that is customarily used to name all these biologically necessary activities together with the equally necessary inactivity of sleep. How, then, shall we refer to them as the set of things we must do repetitively, day in and day out, if we are to preserve our health, vitality, and vigor?

I have in the past grouped them under the one word sleep, using that word with a broader connotation than attaches to the word slumbering, in order to cover all the things we are compelled to do repetitively for our health's sake. This goes against the grain of ordinary usage, but it is an expedient that I hope readers will permit me to adopt in order to avoid more cumbersome terminology. From time to time, I will remind the reader that sleeping comprises all the biologically necessary inactivities and activities that we are compelled to engage in for some portion of our daily life.

Assuming that sleeping occupies a third of our life's time, what fills the rest of it -- the sixteen hours, more or less, that remain each day? To answer this question, and to discover what activities are available to fill the time of our lives, let us consider all the time occupying parts of life, including in the enumeration both sleep and toil.

Adapted from
A Vision of the Future (1984), Part I, Chapter 2

Revised 18 December 2000

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