Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.
Tom HodgkinsonOften, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
Tom HodgkinsonAs the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
Tom HodgkinsonTo me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.
Tom HodgkinsonIndolence of course is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.
Tom HodgkinsonThe siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the second world war and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.
Tom HodgkinsonWe bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
Tom HodgkinsonIn a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
Tom HodgkinsonBenjamin 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.
Tom HodgkinsonThe 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."
Tom HodgkinsonWhen stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.
Tom HodgkinsonWriting a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler.
Tom HodgkinsonIf Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.
Tom HodgkinsonIf you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Tom HodgkinsonBy taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the UK has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises.
Tom HodgkinsonDeleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
Tom HodgkinsonI 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!
Tom HodgkinsonBeauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.
Tom HodgkinsonFaffing of course does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
Tom HodgkinsonIt takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice.
Tom HodgkinsonLabour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
Tom Hodgkinson...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
Tom HodgkinsonOne aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
Tom HodgkinsonThere's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
Tom HodgkinsonI would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace.
Tom HodgkinsonWhen you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.
Tom HodgkinsonWe have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
Tom HodgkinsonAlthough I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion.
Tom HodgkinsonThe world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
Tom HodgkinsonFaffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.
Tom HodgkinsonI originally welcomed the mobile phone as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom.
Tom HodgkinsonWhen the day comes, I remember how much I loathe flying. I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.
Tom HodgkinsonFacebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy.
Tom HodgkinsonOne of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower.
Tom HodgkinsonEmbrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.
Tom HodgkinsonBeauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
Tom HodgkinsonSensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom HodgkinsonA conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom HodgkinsonWhen people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.
Tom HodgkinsonWe have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.
Tom Hodgkinson