A week or so ago an author whom I admire posted on her blog that she was burned out. When she described her life, it was full of impressive achievements but did seem frenetic. She wrote about trying to make time to do things that ‘sparked joy’ and weren’t connected with work, as a way of recuperating. Let us hope that it restores her.
Ruminating on this and on the pressures of modern life on us to work hard and even in our ‘leisure time’ remain busy, I remembered How to Be Idle, a charming little book which was a bestseller in – gasp! 2004, that’s a long time ago. I was given this as a present and I remember being slightly offended – I yield in no one in my ability to laze. But I did read it and found that much of it accorded with my own views, albeit far more brilliantly articulated, wider ranging and better researched. It’s fun and flawed and having reread it just now I do recommend it, to anyone who likes entertaining arguments and anyone who feels the need for more sloth in their lives.
[I am] a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning. (Dr Johnson, something of a hero in these pages)
The title is misleading. This isn’t a how-to book, although if you need some inspiration you will surely find it here; it’s a manifesto, a call to arms. For Tom Hodgkinson, laziness is a mark of a counter-culture, part of a proud tradition of rebellion and sticking it to the Man. The art of idleness lies in understanding that it should never be a full-time occupation but should be part of an elegantly balanced life. Periods of sloth should be interspersed with intervals of intense activity (Hodgkinson’s own life being an excellent illustration of this: when he wrote the book, in his mid-thirties, he had already established a career as a writer and journalist, founded and edited a magazine, set up a company importing absinthe and begotten a family while doing his best to maintain his idling principles in a farmhouse in North Devon).
(Author photograph from here)
The book is laid out in twenty-four chapters, each chapter associated with an hour of the day or night. Drawing on a ‘canon of idle writing, from the philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years’, Hodgkinson discusses different aspects of loafing about, from fishing to drinking martinis, skiving to star-gazing, ignoring the alarm clock to not going on holiday, so that you, dear reader, can start to question your drone life and inject a bit of joy into your existence. He is clever and entertaining and this is a delightful book which will cheer you up if you are feeling low and stiffen your lip if your boss is bullying you.
Importantly, idleness is associated with freedom:
Being idle [...] is about being free to live the lives we want to lead, freedom from bosses, wages, commuting, consuming and debt. Being idle is about fun, pleasure and joy.
Asserting your right to do as you please with your own time is a revolutionary act in a world which values wealth and conformity. The next time you skive off work, take proper sick leave or arrive late at the office, consider yourself a rebel fighting against the current of corporate enslavement! It’ll make you feel much better about it. Furthermore, idleness is not just a pleasurable end in itself: it may have purpose. Time spent daydreaming, dozing late in bed or drinking a pint with friends can generate new ideas, useful if you are an artist or some sort of creative in a company (less useful if you’re the cleaner, who ever asks the company cleaner for ideas about new products? And why don’t they?).
I have to say, I took issue with this second point. Call me a foaming purist but lazing about to generate ideas seems to me like covert work and thus not truly in the spirit of proper idling. I admit that calls into question the nature of work and Hodgkinson is very keen on people working for themselves and earning money doing what they love rather than mindlessly commuting to an office every day to churn out consumerist crap.
My own theory is that the world is divided into two types: the idle and the anti-idle. The anti-idle I hereby christen ‘botherers’. Botherers are people who simply cannot help interfering in other people’s lives. They lack imagination, believe in hard work, exploitation and hypocrisy, and make perfect politicians, bureaucrats and fat cats. They want to make something happen, but don’t really care what it is. They impose their beliefs on others by force of law, coercion and newspapers, and justify their actions by saying they have created jobs, or cut costs, or increased spending or made profits for their shareholders.
While I am in the spirit of carping, there were other things I took issue with in How to Be Idle, though it seems mean to do so since the book never takes itself overly seriously. (Fortunately, I am mean.) Very rightly, the uselessness of slaving away to buy unnecessary consumer goods and expensive status symbols is derided: work less and consume less is a motto many of us could support. Yet even back in 2004, before the recession, stagnation of wages and rise of zero-hours contracts, many people did have to work long hours or two jobs simply to make ends meet. This was rather dismissed, I felt.
(Portrait of Samuel Johnson, champion idler, from here)
I also thought his historical analysis was disputable. A lover of the eighteenth century, Hodgkinson is convinced that everything went to pot for us with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution – and to a certain extent he is right, working life did become grim for many people. However, it is misleading to suggest that everyone before that lived the sort of independent existence of the Birmingham weavers he describes. Labourers and servants, to mention but two of the larger groups of pre-industrial workers, were very much subject to the whim of their employers and thus not especially free. And he rashly overlooks the role of the Enclosure Acts!
And there is another large group of people who had little if any time to loaf about in Britain before, during and after the Industrial Revolution: women. I didn’t notice this when I first read the book but this time it really leapt out at me. There are hardly any women in this call to laziness and none at all in the canon of idle writing Hodgkinson alluded to creating. There are a couple of female academics whose work is quoted, Geri Halliwell and Madonna, who are mostly scorned for being try-hards rather than idlers, and Penny Rimbaud, founder of CRASS and practiser of self-sufficiency (which seems rather hard work for an idler but as I mentioned, idling is counter-culture). All the poets, musicians, thinkers and artists who are quoted are (white) men. Oh! With the notable exception of Florence Nightingale in the chapter on sex. Hm. Why might this be? And who was washing the socks and cooking the meals of the creators of the canon of idle writing, I wonder?
(Jerome K. Jerome, another heroic idler, from here)
I further notice the kind of activity that qualifies as idling. Skiving, going to raves and pubs, fishing, reading (e.g. poetry and philosophy), rioting, drinking, smoking, napping and walking are all acceptable forms of idling; watching television, gardening, sewing, knitting, window-shopping or going to the hairdresser’s are not. To me, there’s a whiff of class as well as gender complicating the idle life that’s championed in these pages.
All in all, idleness is a complex subject and in fact historically at least has been a privileged state. However, we can still strive for it on behalf of ourselves and others, and the world would probably be a better place if everyone were persuaded to read How to Be Idle. I promise it will make you laugh, at any rate, and feel fond of Dr Johnson. And remember:
Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition. In his youth, the great poet of loafing, Walt Whitman, would arrive at the offices of the newspaper where he worked at around 11.30 a.m., and leave at 12.30 for a two-hour lunch break. Another hour’s work after lunch and it was time to hit the town.
The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together. This to me is the true spirit of anarchy; each feeds off the other in a happy circle of our own creation.