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Guilt Is Also A Way For Us To Express To Others That We Are A Person Of Good Conscience. 'i Feel Really Guilty About Getting Drunk Last Night,' We Say, When In Actual Fact We Feel No Guilt Whatsoever Or, At Least, We Could Choose To Feel No Guilt. When People Say To Me, 'i Drank Too Much Last Night,' I Always Reply, 'i Drank Exactly The Right Amount.

-Tom Hodgkinson

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Guilt Is Also A

Tom Hodgkinson

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Guilt Is Also A Way For Us To Express To Others That We Are A Person Of Good Conscience. 'i Feel Really Guilty About Getting Drunk Last Night,' We Say, When In Actual Fact We Feel No Guilt Whatsoever Or, At Least, We Could Choose To Feel No Guilt. When People Say To Me, 'i Drank Too Much Last Night,' I Always Reply, 'i Drank Exactly The Right Amount.

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Education Itself Is A Putting Off, A Postponement; We Are Told To Work Hard To Get Good Results. Why? So We Can Get A Good Job. What Is A Good Job? One That Pays Well. Oh. And That's It? All This Suffering, Merely So That We Can Earn A Lot Of Money, Which, Even If We Manage It, Will Not Solve Our Problems Anyway? It's A Tragically Limited Idea Of What Life Is All About.

Life Is About Recapturing Lost Freedoms.

By 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.

Often, The Things That A Lot Of Work Has Gone Into Have Been Incredibly Bad Because They're Over-worked.

Embrace 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.

Deleting 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.

Part Of This Individualism Is You Feel This Pressure That You Alone Have To Conquer The World, And If You Don't Work All The Hours God Gives Then You Start Feeling Really Guilty. If You Can Stop Feeling Guilty, Then I Think It's Easier To Start Doing What You Want To Do.

Conquer The World

In 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.

Facebook 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.

When The Day Comes, I Remember How Much I Loathe Flying. I Seethe At The Humiliation Of Airport Security Checks.

Paradoxically, To Be Truly Idle, You Also Have To Be Efficient.

The Idea Of A Government Is To Create An Ordered, Willing Work Force Where There's No Trouble. I Think Idlers Are Generally Seen As Potentially Dangerous Because They're Asking Questions.

Asking Questions

Computers Tend To Separate Us From Each Other - Mum's On The Laptop, Dad's On The Ipad, Teenagers Are On Facebook, Toddlers Are On The Ds, And So On.

Punk Was A Protest Against Work And Against Boredom. It Was A Sign Of Life, A Rant, A Scream, A Rejection Of Bourgeois Morals. But Have Things Improved Since Then? Arguably, They've Got Worse.

What Is Required As We Travel Towards Full Unemployment Is Not New Legislation But A Gradual Change Of Mental Attitude, A Shift In Values. As Our Taste For Idling Grows, We Will Refuse To Work For Old-fashioned Bosses Who Demand A Five-day, 40-hour, Nine-to-five Type Week, Or Worse.

These Days We Seem More Bound To Our Bosses Than Ever Before. We Even Identify Our Own Selves With The Jobs We Do: "what Do You Do?" Is The First Question We Ask Each Other At Parties, As If A Job Title Could Express A Fundamental Truth About Our Personality.

There Is Nothing So Perfect As Pinball And A Pint At 11 A.m.

Meetings, Clearly, Can Take Place Anywhere, And Wouldn't It Be Nice To See Your Coworkers Lounging On The Grass With Their Shoes Off?

My Idea Of Childcare At Festivals Is To Sit At A Trestle Table With An Ale While The Kids Run Around And Make Up Their Own Games.

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Take A Nap.

I 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.

If 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.

I've Given Up Email. Well, Almost. At The Weekend I Set Up One Of Those Auto-reply Messages, Informing My Correspondents That I Would No Longer Be Checking My Emails, And That Instead They Might Like To Call Or Write, As We Used To In The Olden Days.

In This Age Of Getting What You Want And Getting It Now, The Simple Pleasure Of Browsing Is Often Forgotten.

Getting What You Want

Faffing 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.

My Hope Is That Flexible Working And Varying Shift Patterns Will Give Workers A Taste For Idling And That They Will Gradually Demand Greater Reductions In The Length Of The Working Week.

Faffing Is Good. It Is An Important Part Of Life. Faffing Is When We Disconnect From The Matrix And Idle For A While, Like A Car. Our Body And Spirit Know Deep Down That Human Beings Were Not Made For Constant Toil So Subconsciously Creates Space Through The Mechanism Of Faffing.

All Of Our Technology Is Completely Unnecessary To A Happy Life.

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.

Writing 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.

If 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.

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Making A Living

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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!

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All Poets Are Idlers, Even If All Idlers Are Not Poets.

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When People Say " I Just Don't Have Enough Time " They Mean " I Prioritized Something Else.

There'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.

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Working Is Bad Enough In The Winter, But In The Summer It Can Become Completely Intolerable. Stuck In Airless Offices, Every Fibre Of Our Being Seems To Cry Out For Freedom. We're Reminded Of Being Stuck In Double Maths While The Birds Sing Outside.

Being Lazy Does Not Mean That You Do Not Create. In Fact, Lying Around Doing Nothing Is An Important, Nay Crucial, Part Of The Creative Process. It Is Meaningless Bustle That Actually Gets In The Way Of Productivity. All We Are Really Saying Is, Give Peace A Chance.

I Think It's Good To Look At How People Lived Before, And Then Take The Best Bits Of That Culture And Try To Mix It In With Your Own.

I've Never Understood Activity Holidays Since We Seem To Have Far Too Much Activity In Our Daily Lives As It Is. Find A Culture Where Loafing Is The Order Of The Day And Where They Don't Understand Our Need To Be Constantly Doing Things. Find Somewhere You Can Have A Hammock Holiday.

Idleness Allows You To Turn A Situation From Boredom To Pleasure.

Guilt Is Also A Way For Us To Express To Others That We Are A Person Of Good Conscience.

Bosses Should Sanction The Nap Rather Than Expect Workers To Power On All Day Without Repose. They Might Even Find That Workers' Happiness - Or What Management Types Refer To As "employee Satisfaction Results" - Might Improve.

Little Things Like Making Clothes, Baking Bread, Cooking, Even Useless Things Like Bird-watching, Sketching Flowers, Playing Guitar In The Home - That Sort Of Time Is Gone. And The Time We Have? We're So Exhausted, We Want To Let Ourselves Get Sucked In To The Escape World Of Tv. I'm Speaking From Experience; I'm Not Above All This.

Indolence 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.

The 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.

Guilt Is Also A Way For Us To Express To Others That We Are A Person Of Good Conscience. 'i Feel Really Guilty About Getting Drunk Last Night,' We Say, When In Actual Fact We Feel No Guilt Whatsoever Or, At Least, We Could Choose To Feel No Guilt. When People Say To Me, 'i Drank Too Much Last Night,' I Always Reply, 'i Drank Exactly The Right Amount.

I Like The Idea Of Becoming [fairly] Good At Lots Of Things Rather Than Very Good At Just One Thing. So It Would Be Nice To Be Okay At The Guitar Or At The Piano, A Reasonable Cook, Perhaps Able To Fix Your Car Or Do Some Basic Carpentry, And Be Able To Write The Odd Article. Rather Than Being Super Good At One Tiny Thing, To Be Kind Of Average At Lots Of Things. It Might Mean That You Have A More Kind Of Enjoyable, Complete Life.

The Art Of Living Is The Art Of Bringing Dreams And Reality Together.

Self-importance Is A Trap, Because The Moment We Start To Think That We Actually Matter Is The Moment When Things Start To Go Wrong. The Truth Is That You Are Supremely Unimportant And Nothing Matters. All Of Man's Striving Is For Nothing; All Effort Is Wasted. To Realize That Everything Is Meaningless Is Tremendously Liberating, Since It Then Leaves Us Completely Free To Create Our Own Lives And Ignore The Plans That Others Have For Us.

Laziness Works. And The Simple Way To Incorporate Its Health Benefits Into Your Life Is Simply To Take A Nap.

I 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.

Labour-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.

Beauty 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.

There Are A Lot Of Little Tricks You Can Do To Inject A Bit More Time Into The Day. Most Important Is Limiting Yourself To A 40 Hour Week, Not Working 50 Hours Or 60 Or 70. It's Just Crazy. It's Actually Irresponsible To You And Irresponsible To Your Family And Friends. Why Should Your Employer's Profits Be More Important Than Your Own Family? You're Not Even Going To Get Any Of The Profits - All You Get Is Not Losing Your Job. It's A Very Negative System.

I Could Happily Lean On A Gate All The Livelong Day, Chatting To Passers-by About The Wind And The Rain. I Do A Lot Of Gate-leaning While I Am Supposed To Be Gardening; Instead Of Hoeing, I Lean On The Gate, Stare At The Vegetable Beds And Ponder.

In Both Word And Deed, One Of The Greatest Idlers Of All Time Was John Lennon. In His Songs We See Repeated Defences Of Simply Lying Around Doing Nothing.

Faffing Of Course Does Not Fit The Programme. We Are Supposed To Be Busy, Productive Citizens.

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