An Idler's Life

By Katie Renz, Mother Jones. Posted June 25, 2005.

Ten a.m. is for sleeping in, three in the afternoon for a nap (waking fresh for teatime). Then a rambling stroll followed by the first drink of the day. Ten in the evening: pints at the pub; a midnight contemplation of the celestial sphere; meditation at four in the morning.

Who the hell lives like this?

Tom Hodgkinson, for one. His book, How to be Idle, just out in the United States, is a treatise on living a life of leisure and should be required reading for the Western world's workaholics -- and especially for Americans, who with their collective 415 million unused vacation days last year and pathetic 53 percent job dissatisfaction rates could evidently use some edifying pointers on successful loafing.

In his early 20s, Hodgkinson was becoming "massively disappointed" with the world of work post-graduation. "At the University I was more or less the master of my own time," he said, reminiscing about his days publishing magazines, playing in bands, and attending great lectures. "But I started to question this whole idea of jobs because it was taking away my freedom." He intended to become a freelance writer (both his parents were journalists), but was chronically unable to get out of bed. "I wasn't doing it with any pleasure, I was feeling really pissed off at myself," he recalled. In the midst of this guilty inaction he found a series of essays by Samuel Johnson on the virtues of kicking back and the vital link between idleness and creativity. As he told a British interviewer, "I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!"

The fruits of this un-labor came in 1993 with the first issue of the Idler, a magazine founded on "conviction that laziness has been unjustly criticized by modern society, and that it deserves to have its good conscience returned to it." True to topic, the essays and articles -- exploring everything from "crap jobs" to the benefits of shunning a career, to a celebration of lunchtime -- come out at a leisurely twice a year. The current issue declares a "War on Work."

What would happen, Hodgkinson asks, if we did embraced, say, a four-day work week, or decided to work three hours of the day? One possibility is predicted by the idler's golden rule: one creates in inverse proportion to the time one spends working. Hodgkinson spoke with Mother Jones from his seaside farm in Devon, England, after an afternoon spent puttering about the garden.

Mother Jones: We stay late at the office, we don't take our vacation time, we neglect our families and our interests. Where did we go wrong?

Tom Hodgkinson: What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. You would have thought that the end of all this innovation, technological advancement, and financial wizardry should be to create less work, not more of it. I think you have to put it down to, particularly in the case of America, Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.

But that all changed in the 18th century. The Factory Age took people out of their self-sufficient life and made them dependent on wages. At the same time, there's propaganda from the people at the top instilling you with a guilty feeling around work. You're not contributing to society in the way you're expected to. And fear of losing your job keeps you more or less enslaved. The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, "I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams."

MJ: You've written that the concept of boredom didn't really exist until 1760.

TH: That's the date most of us put on the Industrial Revolution, i.e. the age of the Big Machine. The idea of the machine was that we wouldn't have to do that kind of work anymore ourselves. But you still need lots of men to work the machines, and these men become robotic because there's no real skill involved. It's like in Fast Food Nation where Eric Schlosser says the ultimate successful business could be operated by monkeys. They make it easier and easier to work the machines and keep the wages as low as possible. In the past we had a more varied existence, where you might do a bit of weaving, you'd be tending the garden, you were involved in a whole range of activities. You still see it now, if you go to, say, rural Mexico. Work was mixed in with leisure, and the day was more varied, so it wasn't boring.

Katie Renz is a former editorial intern at Mother Jones.

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