Quote

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.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Look
Rooms
Papers
Looks
Move
Pace
Trying
Stand
Staring
Middle
Embrace
Downstairs
Came
Garden
Fingertips
Moving
Window
Drum
Around
Paper
Stare
Remember
Room
Bend

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Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
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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.
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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.
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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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Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
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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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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.
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There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.
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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.
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Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
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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.
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Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
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When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
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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?
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