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Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Turns
Idleness
Boredom
Allows
Turn
Situation
Pleasure

More quotes by Tom Hodgkinson

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It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
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We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
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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.
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Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
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Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
Tom Hodgkinson
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We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.
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What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.
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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
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One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion.
Tom Hodgkinson
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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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
Tom Hodgkinson