In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. ‘For the first time since creation,’ he predicted, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to occupy the leisure which science…will have won for him.’

So where did this vision of future past go? Griffith Review 81 examines the terms and conditions of our contemporary relationship with the leisure regime, its fallouts and limitations, and how we came to cede so much simply to amuse ourselves to death.