We Don't All Have to Be Workaholics

Are you reading this at work?

If so, are you sneak-reading it, keeping open a passel of other files that can hide this one at a click? Or not, because your job doesn't involve desks, or because it lets you stay home alone in pajamas, nibbling Cheezits? Or do you have no job because you can't find one or don't need one or don't want one, and you've got another plan?

In a country that hammered its way to world-power status while singing about hauling barges and working on the railroad, what we do with our live-long days is now, for most Americans, more a matter of choice than ever before. Technically, we're free. And in droves we opt out, slack off, shuffle back to our moms' basements. Sooner or later we become wage slaves. Or we don't. And watching clouds sail over the skatepark, or updating that spreadsheet with the latest sales figures, we ask ourselves whether "work" and "ethic" even belong in the same sentence anymore.

Tom Lutz probes 400 years' worth of changing attitudes toward work in "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2006). A blues keyboardist and screenwriter who heads a University of California M.F.A. program, Lutz admits that he's conflicted: "My life of sloth blends imperceptibly into my pathological flip side, my workaholism." He and his friends are "all lazy imposters, and we are all workaholic slaves." He was just as torn when, as a boomer rebel at a '70s commune, he loved outwitting The Man yet wondered why he was, basically, breaking rocks in the hot sun.

In tracing the anti-career careers of superstar literary slackers -- Melville, Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Wilde, Whitman, Stevenson, Keats, Kerouac -- Lutz stacks the deck. Writers, especially ones we've heard of, hardly comprise a random sampling of any era's slacker sector. Because they are those select few with sufficient skill, schooling and in many cases rich relatives to fuel dreamy descriptions of their chosen lifestyle, theirs are the voices we hear. (Not to mention the fact that writing is one of those rare forms of work that pretty much require sporadic idle spans.) And theirs are the voices dominating this book, with shout-outs from songwriters (such as Harry McClintock, who penned "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum"), scholars (such as Barbara Ehrenreich) and celebs such as Karl Marx's Cuban-born anarchist son-in-law Paul Lafargue, fond of "the free and lazy American" who "prefers a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant."

But failed-businessman Lafargue lived on handouts from Marx and Engels. Wordsworth lived on an inheritance. Such realities sugar this book with a certain built-in elitism. Professors are funny that way.

But it's fun to fantasize with Lutz about utopias -- dreamed up by the IWW in 1933, by bestselling 19th-century novelists such as Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells, by early 20th-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell -- which feature four-hour workdays. Or three hours. Two and two-thirds. Even ten-minute workdays, in Bellamy's book "Looking Backward." Such shifts would imbue labor with meaning "not because labor is good," Russell reasoned, "but because leisure is good." And "since men will not be tired in their spare time," he reasoned, they'll spend it wisely.

Uh huh.

Off-hours. On-hours. The sad fact is that for only the luckiest few, both types are equally appealing. I Love My Job is a joke printed on coffee mugs. Granted, at the far end of the spectrum some workers and would-be workers are strapped beyond the realm of jokes or choice or fantasy. But how the rest of us divvy up our days, and what we spend them doing, comes down to a series of equations, arithmetical and ethical. Their variables include skill and will, time and money. If work is hell, then how much is your freedom worth? Sacrifices seem less sacrificial if every skipped mocchiato, every thrift-shop shirt, buys you another Tuesday all your own.