[Darwin] was passionate and driven, so much so that he was given to anxiety attacks over his ideas and their implications. He many not have spent that many hou

[Darwin] was passionate and driven, so much so that he was given to anxiety attacks over his ideas and their implications. He many not have spent that many hours sitting at a desk, but he had to be directing a tremendous amount of mental effort and attention to his work to have this sort of reaction. The article describes his not-sitting-at-a-desk time as "downtime," and maybe that's half-defensible. But that "downtime" probably isn't something I'd recognize as leisure time, either. Here's something else that many successful 19th/20th century artists, scholars, writers, and scientists turn out to have had in common, the other side of the same coin, perhaps: sufficient economic prosperity (often familial) to employ servants. They could devote great swaths of time and attention to their work, even when away from a desk, because they were not fretting about the grocery shopping, not wondering if they should be pushing the kids harder on their ABCs, etc. The class structure and sexism that made such arrangements common also surely squandered enormous amounts of human potential.