Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.

Cooley contrasts two kinds of “not working” that are often conflated. Unemployment, in his formulation, is an enforced idleness marked by insecurity, loss of status, and the erosion of agency; it “diminishes” because it narrows a person’s options and self-conception. Leisure, by contrast, is chosen or protected time—space for reflection, study, art, relationships, and play—so it “enlarges” by expanding inner life and capacities. The aphorism also critiques societies that treat all nonwork as moral failure: the harm lies not in free time itself but in the coercive conditions and stigma attached to joblessness, versus the generative potential of genuine leisure.