221;, pursue habits and non-work related interests and express the whole of their personality. This served to blur the historical differences between work and leisure. They were both commended now by the mores of our time. Work became less and less structured and rigid – formerly, the main feature of leisure time. Work could be pursued – and to an ever growing extent, was pursued – from home. The territorial separation between “work-place” and “home turf” was essentially eliminated. The emotional leap was only a question of time. Historically, people went to work because they had to – and all the rest was designated “pleasure”. Now, both were pleasure – or torture – or mixture. Some people began to enjoy their work so much that it fulfilled for them the functions normally reserved to leisure time. They are the workaholics. Others continued to hate work – but felt disoriented in the new, leisure enriched environment. They were not qualified or trained to deal with excess time, lack of framework, no clear instructions what to do, when, with whom and to what. Socialization processes and socialization agents (the State, parents, educators, employers) were not geared – nor did they regard it as being their responsibility – to train the populace to cope with free time and with the baffling and dazzling variety of options. Economies and markets can be classified using many criteria. Not the least of them is the work-leisure axis. Those societies and economies that maintain the old distinction between (hated) work and (liberating) leisure – are doomed to perish or, at best, radically lag behind. This is because they will not have developed a class of workaholics big enough to move the economy ahead. And this is the Big Lesson : it takes workaholics to create, maintain and expand capitalism. As opposed to common beliefs (held by the uninitiated) ̵...
