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.Collection: Men
The 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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Boredom
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.Collection: Naps
Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather.Collection: Eight
Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Giving
Alongside my "no email" policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.Collection: Real
As 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.Collection: Mother
It 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.Collection: Art
Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?Collection: Summer
It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.Collection: Degrees
When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.Collection: Space
Travelling fills me with dread.Collection: Dread
One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?Collection: People
When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Real
There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.Collection: Perfect
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.Collection: Summer
Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Important
A 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.Collection: Idlers
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.Collection: Real
Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.Collection: Dream
When 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.Collection: Morning
Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion.Collection: Children
Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?Collection: Zuckerberg
When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.Collection: Sleep
All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.Collection: Idlers
Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?Collection: Enjoy
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Running
Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off?Collection: Nice
Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.Collection: Idle
In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.Collection: Simple
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!Collection: Creative
We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.Collection: Numbers
Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.Collection: Life Is
When the day comes, I remember how much I loathe flying. I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.Collection: Airports
When 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.Collection: Weed
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.Collection: Pain
The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.Collection: Philosophy
I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Attitude