The economic dimension of societies has an influence that is both decisive and incisive on the lives of human beings. I do not feel myself to be a herald of unadulterated leisure, external to the economy but neither do I wish to look away as if I was living in a neutral world. It is not possible to adopt any position without taking into consideration a series of economic factors that from my point of view have a special repercussion upon the ways leisure is experienced.

These are a series of “normalities” that tend to support the standardisation of leisure, favouring a conception where the capacity to experience is absent.  It goes without saying that I have presented these distinct economic particularities in a deliberately exaggerated manner as a resource to counteract their capacity to go unnoticed.

– First particularity. The product will take care of everything for you. All you have to do is keep on consuming and the rest will come by itself. The combination of suitable images and words generate a highly convincing suggestivity where the product seems to be endowed with almost magical powers. There is no need for you to do anything when you visit a place. The quality of the experience has no relation with your capacity to educate and refine the way you perceive reality.

-Second particularity. The advantages of quantity are manifold. This has led us to believe that reality can always be divided into parts. This manoeuvre allows us to quantify each part precisely and to put a price on it. Everything can become a product in order to be sold.

We tend to forget that there are attributes of reality whose value lies in their sense of continuity and totality, in our not knowing where to locate their beginning and end, in the impossibility of being isolated and clearly defined. We also forget that there are levels of reality that function in terms of processes, following certain rhythms, timings and directions that cannot be forced or directed at whim. Is everything accessible at a price? 

-Third particularity. The pursuit of the maximum profit has become a commandment. According to this commandment, you are the object of study with the objective of finding out how you work and from there, identifying the best way to sell you something. The debate is open. The legitimacy of the means employed to stimulate consumption is a thorny question. At this time the tendency is to foster impulse consumption, encouraging a kind of agitated attention, incapable of sustaining emptiness and requiring permanently changing stimuli. As these habits of attention become more significant, the capacity to experience is reduced to its minimum expression.

-Fourth particularity. We live in societies where an accelerated and highly programmed sense of time is occupying more and more spaces, where there are many things to be done and done quickly; there is never enough time; we always have to be busy doing something, following set schedules. In addition to this, over our cultural history time has become a neutral, homogenous phenomenon, reduced to its bare metric qualities. 

The result of all this is an ever greater distancing of the presence and duration of internal rhythms, the loss of the sense of difference intrinsic to each moment and the faculty of orientation deriving from this, the difficulty of tuning in at the right moment for the right action, the incapacity to go into the paradox of the generative capacity of goalless time. From here the experience of life moves in a series of set directions where other possibilities are forgotten. 

Having identified these four coordinates we can now return to our starting point, the world we live in. We are not external to the economic system of our time and its effects. Despite all this I do not wish to give up on an experiment. This experiment consists in sharing my perspectives with you. Perhaps this could give rise to the understanding and trust required for jointly creating options that are relevant for you to discover Mallorca where before there were only unsatisfactory alternatives.