Run
the rat race. Life in the fast lane. Nose to the grindstone. Bootstrap
it. Work, work, work. Nine to five is nine to six, or eight to five,
or longer for many people. Americans work an average of 48 hours
a week, most without overtime pay for those extra eight, but the
Protestant work ethic that defines modern life has lead to wealth
and leisure for all. Or has it?
British writer Tom Hodgkinson would argue that no, it has not. In
How to be Idle Hodgkinson might seem at first to be working
the same vein as books like Juliet B. Schor’s The Overspent
American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need and Gregg Easterbrook’s
The Progress Paradox, have. We work too hard, spend too much,
and never feel good. We are chasing the dragon
called the American Dream and it will never make us happy.
Hold up, wait a minute.
Hodgkinson, who is the founder and editor of a magazine called The
Idler, which is dedicated to the art of loafing, isn’t
quite saying scale back, downsize, stop sweating the small stuff
or don’t worry about where your cheese is. This seems to be
something else. In a refreshingly exuberant tone, he seems to be
exhorting readers to slack with gusto, laze with passion, take a
big puff off the pipe of idleness, because therein lie the spiritual
and intellectual riches we seek. Oh, and hangovers? Learn to love
them.
It’s all in pursuit of liberty of the mind. Stop giving so
many hours to the man, and take them back for yourself. All those
things you think you want are just making you work harder, but the
heck with it. Don’t leave your corporate job to start an organic
farm. Just sleep in, stay out late, drink loose tea instead of bagged
and perhaps smoke cigarettes sometimes. (This is a British book,
remember.)
If you happen to be personally inclined toward a living a Bohemian
life, this sounds like a great idea. Tricky without a trust fund,
perhaps, but nevertheless, it’s always good to have a reminder
that all this consumerism and work ethic and the rest of it is a
fairly recent development in the history of Western civilization,
and Hodgkinson does a tidy job of summarizing the transition from
the days of growing your own food, making your own beer, and managing
your own time to running from the office to the warehouse store
to the gym.
The ideal of a life of leisure, however, is not new. The Greeks
maintained that citizens, those lucky few free men not obliged to
dirty their hands on manual labor, lived the most noble life. Indeed,
in Politics, Aristotle suggests that the highest goal in life is
leisure. Those poor grubby slaves, tradesmen and craftsmen doing
all the work did not lead the best of all possible lives, nor did
the women who labored at child-rearing, weaving, sewing and food
preparation. Leisure (schole, the root of scholars and school) left
time for the life of the intellect, free thinking, independence.
Hodgkinson’s book takes a similar stance, and similarly sidelines
laborers and women at times; it is hard to imagine the lifestyle
he champions being feasible for the minimum-wage workers documented
by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting by in
America or for a primary caretaker of children. In the most casual
of ways, Hodgkinson excludes women from this gloriously idle life.
“Flaneur literally means stroller or idler, and, in the 19th
century, came to describe an elegant kind of gentlemanly moocher....”
he explains. When women show up they are likely to be “rosy-cheeked
milkmaids singing ballads in the woods” in the 17th century;
at one point, he muses, “I often wish I lived in Paris in
the 19th century when visits to luxurious brothels staffed by liberated
courtesans, skilled practitioners in the art of love, were culturally
accepted.” Women readers will likely find it difficult to
locate themselves in Hodgkinson’s landscape, unless they wish
to identify with his girlfriend, who merits occasional mention for
being jealous or far taking care of the kids, or with the cafe girls
and courtesans.
Still, by arguing that idle time allows for revolutionary thinking
and mental liberation, Hodgkinson makes it seem practically our
duty as citizens to stay out all night, try various drugs, lay in
bed thinking creative thoughts, or spending time at work “skiving”
(British for slacking. One sticking point for the American reader
might be the celebration of certain British past times for which
we have no equivalent: tea drinking and the like.)
Hodgkinson has a tendency to point out moments in his literary career
at which he thought himself particularly witty, like the time he
said “staying in is the new going out” in an editorial
meeting at the Guardian. Oh, those clever Brits, always swaddling
kernels of truth in sly one-liners. It turns out that the drill
of urban life, the endless parties, the pressure to dress well,
the pain of taking public transportation and of gaining access to
VIP areas can seriously cramp your idle style. It’s too much
like work, says the author. He doth protest too much and in the
process makes sure you understand that no unwashed laborer is he.
For plenty of drones in the glamour fields, endless socializing
is work, to be sure, but there’s a distinctly different flavor
to putting in overtime at a gallery opening or launch party and
working nights you’d rather not in a factory or restaurant,
or slogging for 50 hours a week in the office trenches.
The book is structured in 24 chapters, each coinciding with an hour
of the day. To construct a book like a page out of a Franklin Planner
seems to contradict its spirit, but the conceit brings with it some
amusement. It opens with waking up at 8 a.m., but the chapter goes
on to discuss the myriad benefits of lazing around in bed for a
few extra hours. Some of the chapters make sense, like 4 p.m.: Time
for Tea and 6 p.m.: The First Drink of the Day. But why fishing
is slotted at 7 p.m. or holidays at 6 a.m. is anybody’s guess.
In the end, the point is, all work and no play makes for an obedient,
easily exploited society. GDP growth, yes. Happy citizens, not really.
But rather than grimly trying to fight the tide of consumerism,
diligently digging out of your debt hole and abstaining from consumption
as one more forbidden pleasure, why not just consume your own time
instead? It’s an excess that just might be rewarding in the
long run.
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