Summer is the season for “recreation.” After slogging through work and school for most of the year, millions of parents and their children try to cram enjoyment into a road trip or an international holiday. They spend enormous amounts of time, money, and effort doing so—in fact, Americans have devoted over $200 billion annually to summer vacation in recent years. Yet while that’s good for business, it may not be the best way for families to order their lives.

So argues author and poet Wendell Berry. As Berry sees it, “recreation” is an unnatural artifact of the modern world. Today, many people spend their working hours performing unpleasant tasks. Similarly, students are forced to sit through monotonous classes by law—one indication that families might have their children spend their time otherwise if given the freedom to do so. Play is alien to both the modern workplace and the modern classroom.

Yet viewed from a long-term perspective, this is quite unusual. Before the mid-1900s, adults and children did not spend their days in artificially separated worlds. Rather, families mixed work and play in the normal course of life. The vast majority of people, historically, were farmers. As adults worked in the fields, their children could join in and play-act on the sidelines. Some communities have preserved this tradition.

In his essays, Berry writes of his home in rural Kentucky, where the tobacco harvest is still carried out by hand. As neighbors work side by side, they tell jokes, sing songs, recount stories, and try to do justice to the memories of those who have passed on to greener pastures. Meanwhile, their kids run in and out of sight, lending a hand when they can and playing games when they can’t.

Any economist will tell you that communities like Berry’s have far lower material standards of living than the average urban area. That may be true. Yet every economist knows that all changes—even the most beneficial ones—have tradeoffs. Perhaps some of our material wealth has come at the cost of the denigration of both work and play.

It’s not just the shift from manual labor in the fields to white-collar work in the office that has eliminated the role that play has in daily life. Housekeeping has also been subject to a similar degradation. When neighborliness was not an option, but a necessity, women often worked together to complete their chores. As they washed, wove, and mended, they often sang folk songs.

The British Council has preserved one of these work songs in a 1941 film on tweed waulking in Scotland. Watching it, you’d never know the UK was going through some of the darkest days of the Blitz. If these women had been furnished with smartphones, how might they have made it through those months?

A skeptical reader might say that these isolated examples can’t be used to craft a romantic picture of poverty. That’s a fair point, but it also misses the mark. One shouldn’t be excessively romantic about the past, but we shouldn’t be excessively romantic about the present, either.

The benefits of modernity have come at a steep cost. When it comes to work and education, that cost has often taken the form of thoroughgoing dehumanization. Bereft of play, or story, or music, too many days are devoted in service of the machine.

If we want an alternative, perhaps, as many of our ancestors did, we need to find ways to blur the line between work and recreation and, along the way, reclaim our humanity in each.

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