A plate from Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747) series of engravings. Photo taken from the Wikipedia entry on Industry and Idleness
This is admittedly conjecture, but it sure seems to me like more and more writers and thinkers these days are praising the value and virtues of idleness. Renowned MIT physicist Alan Lightman recently explored the importance of “wasting time” in a book based on a recent TED talk. He argued that the ability to temporarily liberate oneself from structured time and pressures of modern life is essential to human creativity. Similarly, American artist Jenny Odell’s has recently called on people to “do nothing” through unstructured respite in natural settings, as part of her overall criticism of digital technology’s impact on people’s everyday work habits. For some time, intellectuals and radical thinkers have engaged with the notion that idleness (uncoerced leisure, spontaneous play, inactivity, laziness, whatever you want to call it) is a human right that is too often denied by capitalism. In the early 1900s, British philosopher Bertrand Russell and Czech writer Karel Čapek’s “praised” idleness and unrestricted leisure as a humanist remedy for the overworked, exploited conditions of workers suffering under industrial capitalism. This was not even the most radical of propositions: at the turn of the century French socialist Paul Lafargue, employing a decidedly Marxist approach, polemically declared that people have the “right to be lazy”. Now, in an era defined by such problems as the hollowing of social welfare programs and digital technology’s seeming uncompromising power over people’s everyday activities and work habits, more people like Odell and Lightman are calling for a renewed, nuanced discussion of idleness as a healthy, humanist, virtuous endeavor.
