Eartha Kitt’s line begins by challenging a familiar modern assumption: that life neatly divides into “work” you endure and “leisure” you earn afterward. By saying she has never understood leisure time, she implies that the category itself can be artificial—more a social convention than a human necessity. This refusal isn’t laziness; it’s a critique of compartmentalizing one’s days into opposing zones of obligation and freedom.
From there, the quote pushes us to ask whether leisure is a block of hours on a calendar or a quality of attention we bring to what we do. If it’s the latter, then the boundary between labor and play becomes movable, even dissolvable. [...]
