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Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.

Tom Hodgkinson

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Tom Hodgkinson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Newcastle
Also
Paradoxically
Idle
Efficient
Truly

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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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I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
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Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
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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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It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
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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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Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.
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The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
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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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Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.
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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.
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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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Faffing of course does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
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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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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.
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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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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
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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
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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.
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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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