In reading John Adams diary, I came across an interesting spectacle. He related the same experience two days in a row.
“I spent one evening this week at Billy Belcher’s. I sat, book in hand, on one side of the fire, while Dr. Wendell, Billy Belcher, and Steven Cleverly, and another young gentleman, sat in silence around the card table all the evening. Two evenings I spent at Samuel Quincy’s in the same manner. Doctor Gardiner, Henry Quincy, Ned Quincy and Samuel Quincy, all playing cards the whole evening. This is the wise and salutary amusement that young gentleman take every evening in this town. Playing cards, drinking punch and wine, smoking tobacco and swearing, etc., etc., while a hundred of the best books lie on the shelves, desks, and chairs in the same room. This is not misspense of time; this is a wise and profitable improvement of time – cards and backgammon are fashionable diversions. I know not how any young fellow can study in this town. What pleasure can a young gentleman who is capable of thinking, take in playing cards?” p. 62While they were doing this, at least it seems that the narrative is, Adams was in a corner reading. I’m not sure if he was reading because they didn’t invite him to play, he didn’t know how to play, they were playing a game involving gambling and money and he had none, or if he was just there because it was the only corner in town that had a good lamp.
Anyway you want to look at it, his comment about his contemporaries was not complementary. When you get down to it, there’s not that much difference between the younger generation of the 18th century and the millennials of the 21st-century. There is very little about how these young men are earning a living. Adams himself is always relating how he has dinner with this person, tea with another, and spent an evening in conversation at someone else’s house. There is never any account of how he himself is generating income to pay for things like this at this point in his life.
That is the depressing news. The good news is that he went on to become happily married, a pillar of society, a successful lawyer, Founding Father, and the second president of the United States.
May your time wasters be as valuable as his.
Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, Volume 1. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1992.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.