Book Club #4 - How to Be Idle
A book about 'the freedom and fine art of doing nothing', and a guide on how to reclaim your time from a world obsessed with work and productivity
Welcome to gavisgone.com’s completely free newsletter. Subscribe Now for regular peace of mind in email form. Essays, stories, and blog posts where I write about travel, the outdoors, and how our environment affects our minds. Completely free, zero spam.
Click here for a full archive of all posts.
Just to get straight down to it: this is possibly my favourite book, and one that I’ve recently re-read yet again, this time in the always illuminating context of the pandemic. I refer to this book as a bible of sorts, though I’m almost hesitant to espouse its virtues too much – similarly to how I feel about the late David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (which I will come to some other time) – for fear that being publicly seen as too big a proponent of its philosophical and practical message might make me slightly unemployable.
As the author, and editor of Idler magazine of almost 30 years Tom Hodgkinson puts it, How to Be Idle puts forward ‘alternatives to wage slavery’. Not quite in the sense of Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week, which serves as a pre-iPhone era Anarchist’s Cookbook of how to escape from the realities and routines of traditional 9-5 employment, this book is more of a manifesto of how one should spend their hours and days and nights in the absence of being ‘busy’ or ‘productive’, which Hodgkinson – quite rightly – believes is something we’ve forgotten how to do as a society.
Although it initially comes across as a tongue-in-cheek guide to laziness, the real spirit of this book isn’t in promoting and inspiring idleness for its own sake, but as the natural fermentation ground for creativity, entrepreneurialism and freedom of spirit and expression. The idea that humans are robotic machines designed to churn out labour by-the-hour is an idea that preceded the robots, and now that they’re here, we don’t seem to be expected to work any less. Not just in employment, the commoditisation of leisure and self-care has occurred over the course of this decade and the last, after diet and exercise had been appropriated first. The idler rejects all of that, as even practises in ‘just being’ – such as yoga or formal meditation – are exercises in formalising doing nothing so that they become doing ‘something’, and thus something that money can be charged for.
There’s such a breadth and depth of references to great figures of historical, philosophical, literary, scientific and other cultural importance who believed in living life on their own terms, rather than for work’s sake, and owed to their success the freedom and natural germination of ideas and ingenuity that came from taking activities that are seen by the ‘busy-bodies’ (Thomas Edison is given short shrift throughout – the man who invented the lightbulb so people could work late at night). Proper breaks, going for extended walks, taking naps, staying up late, engaging in long and deep conversations with friends and colleagues, small-talk, rambling, fishing, making art, drinking tea (never a ‘quick cuppa’, and absolutely not coffee – a drink for “winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money-obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics”), and so much more besides. These are the things that, whether or not we accept it or personally view them as such, have lost place in modern society as being anything other than ‘a waste of time’.
As the book progresses, a more serious philosophical thread begins to emerge, and a compelling case is made (though not too strenuously, of course), that it is in the spaces where we are seen to be ‘doing nothing’, is where we are most human.
The author himself is obviously a somewhat productive gentleman – being the editor of a magazine, an importer of foreign liquors, a writer of books and so on – and so the point of his manifesto is not idleness as an expression of laziness or apathy to life. It is more of a rejection of and counterargument to the – entirely culturally developed – notion that we should be working (or even just ‘busy’) all the time. It’s an attitude that this past year perhaps more people than ever will be taking stock of – what is the point of all of this lifestyle if I don’t have my health?
Many people have also seen a rough trajectory of their year careening from the first lockdown – “I need to do everything” – to the second – “I don’t want to do anything (but don’t know how to deal with it)” – and now, as we’re well into the third phase, perhaps many of us have found some kind of balance, where we naturally gravitate towards doing things in our free and non-social time that we simply enjoy doing for their own sake, or if that’s not possible, then being content enough with not being productive.
At the end of the day there’s a lot to be said for a book which makes good arguments for why going to the pub, napping, smoking (yes), fishing and simply being are important elements of a full and healthy life, rather than diet counters or meal plans or ten thousand step counters, which turn leisure into work and something for an accountant to keep track of.
After all, the current concept of ‘well-being’ is so often a means of keeping you fed and watered – or getting you to do the work of keeping yourself well – for someone else’s benefit, or to get more work out of you. The working from home isn’t as idyllic as it sounds, the home schooling is a stressful situation for many, and it turns out that your social and family relationships need more attention and contact than we’ve been told they are worth. Many people already risked their lives going to work, and this last year many more have done so without much say in the matter at all. Maybe this year the world might realise just how much work the average life involves as it is, never mind the crushing weight of endless hours of work topped up with ‘productive’ exercise just to maintain enough health so you don’t keel over and die.
We know now the measure of work that life consists of, maybe this year the one thing we all need to learn – and once rediscovered, defend to the death – is How to Be Idle.
If you enjoyed this, then why not subscribe to my free regular newsletter in which I explore how the outdoors, travel and our sense of place affect how we see the world, through stories, essays and blog posts.