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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.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Long
Slavery
Circus
Really
Experiences
Occasional
Things
Series
Reduced
Life
Periods
Boredom
Office
List
High
Lists
Punctuated
Dies
Thrown
Rack
Living
Bored
Racks

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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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Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
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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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Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
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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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We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
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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.
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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.
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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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Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.
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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.
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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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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 art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
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When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
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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 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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The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.
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