I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.
He also used to raise his birds in the office (when they were newly hatched) - that was pretty darn cool as a 1st grader.
IIRC that second six months is the true classical definition of a life of leisure.
Western society has become much more hierarchical in recent years. It is harder and harder to find any "cracks in system" on a fundamental level. Even if you would consider leisure to be neutral, and not in need of meaning, most people aren't even starting from a neutral point. So if you do something else you end up being underprivileged rather than in leisure.
This kind of runs through it:
https://www.academia.edu/17614838/Aristotle_Leisure_and_the_...
or
https://blogs.harvard.edu/nobleleisure/aristotle-on-work-vs-...
Bonus material (wider in scope, though):
I think that's probably a whole other subject to be tackled.
Aristotle's core point above would be along the lines of:
Relaxation (in order to) -> Work (in order to) -> Leisure (the goal, for its own sake)
Leisure and relaxation being entirely different activities, or lack thereof.
Maybe think of leisure in this case being the activity of passion/deep interest or communal good or else that might not come in returns that pay for any other aspect of your life directly. Work being the activity (that you may well enjoy enough, or have interest in) that pays for everything and allows you time and/or resources for leisure. Relaxation is what helps you essentially stay sane and healthy in order to follow through with the rest.
So it seems like you aren't taking on peoples' ability for leisure, but NA society's values that prevent it [for most people].
So I am not saying it isn't a good idea. Just that it is hard from a practical perspective. Which is why younger people who take sabbaticals often end up in e.g. Asia.
OP's example was a fellow taking time off and exercising his other interests in electronics by learning and experimenting.
Another example might be a hobby. A hobby is a great example of a leisure activity as its [usually] done completely for its own sake. For instance, a sheet metal worker who spends much of their time off work playing in an amateur cricket league [however unlikely and obscure an image that might be].
I don't think I understand, though, how you mean it puts anyone at odds with society. Could you elaborate?
They couldn't just take time off and have a similar life. By leaving work they would lose a lot of the connection to their de facto lives. It wouldn't be worth living in an expensive city, in a small apartment and have expensive coffee "just" to learn electronics. Increasingly the things in people's lives aren't "neutral". Their small apartments are made for going to work from, not necessarily for doing things in. But you can't necessarily move either without losing context.
On the other hand if you are already established. You have a house, a family, friends outside work and whatever else you need, it isn't necessarily that hard to go down in the basement and learn electronics instead of going to work for six months out of the year. Because your environment is "neutral" and exists whether you go to work short-term or not. A lot of people aren't really established like that though.
My advice to the person in question would be to pull your head out of work and sample a little more of that big city while you're paying so much to be there.
There's no reason why every moment of time that isn't paid for by work to be spent on work, outside of that being a choice (given our current example, which sounds like a well-enough-to-do tech worker).
Personally, I couldn't live that way, and I'm probably filling out a few of your checkboxes above. I like the people I work with, but I value [and fear] time too much to give it all into my job—be it tasks, networking, socializing, whatever.
The example you extended sounds more like a problem of agency than one of [a lack of] leisure.
It is. But you can't just take time of work, not replace it with anything and expect to be able to have some sort of leisure. At least not in my experience. I don't live in a big city anymore, but that doesn't really fix things. The equation is as hard as in a city, just in a different way. That is why people like 'bunnie' who do electronics as a passion end up in Asia. There are just so much easier to live and so many more things to do. People who stay e.g. in the US end up moving around different small to medium size cities instead looking for something that makes sense.
Work is additive, "free" time is not subtractive.
I don't understand any else of what you're saying. Electronics is something you can do anywhere, and I'd argue there's a gaping need in much of the spaces in between towns and cities in North America...
I think you're just discussing personal preferences at the end there.
It is just that doing electronics on the weekend when you are tired from work, you don't have enough time to finish even part of something, in a place where parts are expensive or you have to wait weeks for delivery isn't that enjoyable.
Doing electronics in a place where you don't have to worry about rent, you have plenty of time, there are plenty of other things to do, parts are cheap and there is a community is a totally different thing.
Far more people are going to enjoy the second scenario.
Here is an article about Shenzhen [0]. The middle part is about people doing electronics for fun. This is probably around a year before Scotty, in the article, started Strange Parts on youtube.
In my current role, I could probably work 3 days a week and meet my same obligations. Our scrum master could be fired and nobody would even notice.