In Praise of Idleness

"This is wonderful, but feels dated to me. It was written in 1932 so it’s from a different era, when there was still the landed gentry. His basic thesis is that one of the ills of the modern world is the lie that has been sold to us that work is a virtuous and ennobling thing. His argument is that that’s a form of social control – keeping people down by keeping them working. There’s also the puritan idea of idle hands being the devil’s workshop. He makes the counter-suggestion that we ought to be working less, and freeing up more hours to pursue leisure. There are different forms of leisure, of course, some of which is passive and probably not worth striving for. Russell’s argument is that if we went to a four-hour day, and rejigged our culture and social institutions accordingly, then mankind – from the top to the bottom of the social scale – would plunge into active, ennobling forms of leisure, and we would all live in a kinder, gentler society. Yes I think that’s his take, and it’s mine as well. Milan Kundera talks about the wisdom of slowness – the notion that if you slow down, you have more time and space to ask the big questions and contemplate deeper ideas. A fast approach tends to be a superficial one, but when you slow down you begin to engage more deeply with whatever it is you’re doing. You’re also forced to confront what’s happening inside you – which is one of the reasons why I think we find it so hard to slow down. Speed becomes a form of denial. It’s a way of running away from those more deeper, tangled problems. Instead of focusing on questions like who am I, and what is my role here, it all becomes a superficial to-do list. The point that Bertrand Russell makes persuasively and eloquently is that there is an intimate link between slowness and living more deeply and fulfillingly. One of his arguments that I think is timeless is that one of the tyrannies of capitalism of any era is production. It denigrates the idea of doing something for its own sake – you’ve got to measure some kind of outcome. You even see that in the way that people parent today. It’s not enough for a child to go to the park and kick a football around – they’ve got to be in a football clinic with a coach. It has to be something you can put on a CV, rather than just doing it for its own sake. In Praise of Idleness is a glorious paean to doing nothing, or doing things because that’s where the spirit takes you, rather than thinking what you are going to get out of it."