Work is what we do to feed ourselves and keep ourselves warm. Some hunter-gatherers, in a fortunate climate with fortunate vegetation, can work twelve hours a week—leaving the rest of their time for lovemaking, magic, religion, gossip, games, and drinking the local brew. Watching television ads during sports events, I note that we aspire to the condition of this hunter-gatherer. D. H. Lawrence wrote that “for some mysterious or obvious reason, the modern woman and the modern man hate physical work,” and “The dream of every man is that in the end he shall have to work no more.” When there is work in the TV advertisement, it is something done quickly—and the reward is drinking beer. Do we want a house? A house goes up in twenty seconds in a crafted sequence of thirty shots; we watch the house rise as we watch a flower open when the camera takes a frame every four hours over two days. These work-ads remind me of my dreams of gardening, which never included a sore back, in which I never dropped a hoe or misplaced a trowel; in television ads no one is tired, and no one is old. The hunting-gathering TV young, all slim and beautiful and energetic, gather to drink and dance and flirt at the Silver Bullet, aka the Earthly Paradise. We understand that centuries of off-stage labor, not to mention evolution and history and civilization and the opposable thumb, have brought us to this time and moment of sexual leisure. We also understand the hunting-gathering young must have a life-expectancy like a slave’s in a Hittite galley, because nobody here is as old as twenty-seven.

Lawrence writing seventy years ago foresaw the Silver Bullet. “It means, apart from the few necessary hours of highly paid and congenial labor, that men and women shall have nothing to do except enjoy themselves. No beastly housework for the women, no beastly homework for the men. Free! free to enjoy themselves. More films, more motor-cars, more dances, more golf, more tennis and more getting completely away from yourself. And the goal of life is enjoyment.”

Baudelaire on the other hand claimed that work was less boring than amusing yourself. Surely I agree, but not everyone does: Enjoyment in the shape of golf absorbed my father as his work did not; work and its anxiety engaged him—but worry and dread do not characterize the absorbedness that Gurchuran Das described. Golf was an engaging pastime, and the atavistic sources of sport are as clear as the origins of lawncare: not agriculture but warfare.

Pastimes are always atavistic and they will not do for a life’s structure. When work is utterly disagreeable, and week awaits weekend, our delight in recreation reveals our misery. The Silver Bullet, like the touch football game that precedes it, is the house of wretchedness. The goal of life is enjoyment? It depends on the quality of the joy; elsewhere Lawrence wrote, “It seems as if the great aim and purpose in human life were to bring all life into the human consciousness. And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness.” We understand: Not everyone can work to extend the consciousness of others. For most of us, the exercise of freedom—doing what we like doing—may best extend our own.