The following video shares a portion of an audio interview with the late philosopher Alan Watts that is set creatively to a variety of images. In it he invites us to take seriously a very interesting and, I think, important question: “what would you do with your life if money was no object?” When he starts it seems like a nice question to ask. Like, “wouldn’t it be nice if this were the case.” As he moves on, observing that we can easily end up spending lots of our time on things we don’t enjoy, it becomes an important question. And then when he imagines the way we are teaching our children to choose things they despise by...

One of the things we lose from an insatiable desire for more is time. Or, more specifically, time for rest. As I mentioned in last week’s post on the same subject, and as crazy as it may now seem, early proponents of capitalism imagined that eventually we would become so efficient that the demand for our work would shrink and our leisure time (understood as time devoted to pursuing culturally enriching tasks) would grow. A recent study from UCLA, and as reported in the Boston Globe, indicates that’s far from the reality most U.S. households experience. In their book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century, the researchers describe their...

I’ve been reading a fascinating book of late by just this title: How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. This team of a father who is a political economist and son who is a philosopher has shed some very helpful light on my questions about money, happiness, and the Christian life. While I’m only about a third of the way through the book, one very interesting discovery for me has been to learn that the first proponents of capitalism actually viewed it not as the salvation of humankind but as a necessary evil to be endured until humanity evolved. I found this incredibly interesting, particularly given...