So we surely made progress here in the direction of being more idle (though one could question wether you are truly “idle” if you fill your free time with staring at your phones screen, consuming the latest societal rage bait. But i’d say in the spirit of the essay, yes, we are much more idle thanks to tech).
BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While we Europeans are super idle, Chinese arose to be a super power. The US dominates tech and the future technologies. Russia is banging on our front door and we dont have the military means and will to put an end to it. So while idle ness is a great mode for Being, is it a great mode for making sure the own civilization survives?
Thats always my problem with those ideas. They sound super nice in theory, but in the harsh world, there will always be a predator who just works a little bit hardwr to get you …
anyway! loved the essay. thanks for sharing
Edit: I’ve recently started spending a lot of time in Switzerland and the contrast in mindset (and wealth) with the EU is staggering. There is a healthy amount of communal paranoia. They don’t work any harder either, if anything it’s the contrary.
Even those who might accept this is no longer true intellectually find it hard to internalise.
The current complacency, one which we are currently still in the process of unwinding from (it will take years) is that of trade turning violent enemies into mutually beneficial growth opportunities. Russia was the first wake-up call there (but even then for the current situation not for Crimea), and over the last year also the USA. China is, I think, currently mostly seen as opportunity rather than threat.
War is expensive, and not doing it is good when possible. It is bad for everyone that we now feel the need to put 5% or whatever of our GDP into defence when it could have been spent on infrastructure, education, healthcare, or even startup grants.
The problems are security, sovereignty and economic stagnation. Being dependent on super powers and vulnerable to their whims is not good. Weak supply chains are not good. Neither are worsening standards of living.
You are proving the point. The avg. person gets an enormous benefit from it, even in countries like USA, Japan or Korea with far less generous welfare. The gap in standards of living of somebody in the US and somebody in Georgia or Vietnam are ridiculous.
How is this an argument? A poor person in the US has a massively better standard of living than a poor person in Vietnam.
Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.
That worked before globalization. Nowadays, having a small apartment in a city of McMansions means you're upper middle class. Poor people in the west have no apartments and no goats.
Poverty levels are measured relative to median. Poverty in US and poverty in Bangladesh, Russia or Vietnam are completely different things.
In the US poverty line is about $16k, while in Russia for example it is $2300. Even considering the PPP it's like 4 times the difference in living standards. I guess Vietnam or Bangladesh are far worse.
Upd: downvotes with no counterargument. Orange site is becomming more and more a reddit.
In Europe, innovation in the end help everyone. Better healthcare starts with the rich, and ends distributed to everyone. The same is true for everything else.
I wouldn't say it's a matter of complacency, but rather a convergence of problems. To solve those problems, there need to be radical changes, but radical changes are not popular. Politicians win elections by promising stability, not by disrupting lives. The politicians that rise to the top are the ones that don't have any visions for a better future nor the desire to make a difference, because the system does not reward that.
I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
Our success story is the same as recent India one - we're just much smaller. We have educated population that was underemployed and poor, and western companies jumped at opportunity of replacing entry and mid level positions with cheaper workers, across both factory and office work.
At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
Calling India a success story feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the better known Chinese case, or indeed Eastern Europe itself. They still have huge scope for further improvement.
If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote. (Connectivity used to be a key barrier for the latter case, but fast mobile and sat-based connections have changed this quite dramatically.)
Productivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.
You don't, (Western) Europe is just a rentier-place at this point, living on other people's backs. For example look at Maersk, from the much-beloved and relaxed Denmark, their business would crumble over night if it weren't for the Americans keeping the seas open for them.
USA is the only country that ever triggered article 5 of NATO and got military help out of it. And now acts like victims when others don't rush to help them with absurd badly planned war where they are clear aggressors.
The second real use of NATO was to send armies to greenland to discourage USA to attack it just 2 months ago. So, now is really not the time for America to pretend ever do something that is not primary for itself.
That was token help (the Brits excluded), let's be serious here, we're all grown-up men.
Junior doctors across Europe reported working an average of 57 ± 17 hours per week (216 ± 61 hours per month)[0].
[0]: https://www.juniordoctors.eu/assets/rest-report-DeLrwvob.pdf
as someone who spends a lot of time in Spain but lives in the US, the Spanish prioritize social interaction much more than the US (sweeping statement I know) - you go to many towns and cities in Spain and locals are socializing multiple nights per week in vibrant bars and cafes an having so much fun. London has a bit of this with pub culture but less family friendly.
The US on the other hand, the focus is on work and friends rarely get together and we study why people are socializing less (bowling alone etc. ).
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
It’s a lot easier for a business in one US state to expand to another one, but cross border business expansion in EU is still difficult.
People speak different languages, bureaucracy is different and often in a different language as well etc.
On top of that businesses are a lot more regulated than in the US.
In DE I would argue that this is due to punitive taxes and I wouldn't call it progress.
Poor people work their asses 40+ hours and up to overwork since it's always paid here. White collars work less time and often switch to 4 days because at this tax progression working your ass is not worth it. Time is more valuable, indifference curve is screwed.
It also have negative effect on women's careers in combo with 3/5 tax classes thing. And it hurts EU economies very hard since the most productive ones are disincentivized to work more.
It seems to me like in Germany, the rock bottom is high but the glass ceiling is low. I am very happy with this, but if you are nearer to the ceiling, it can feel cramped.
I'm not. If you are european and will inherit something it's fine, but if not you'll barely be able to afford a house and a tiny investment portfolio. And at the face of the immense collapse of a pension system it's pretty grim.
If it makes you feel better, the pension system is collapsing everywhere. The scarier part is how we will find the workforce to care for us, but I digress.
Does more white collar work beyond a threshold produce more value, anyway? Sometimes yes but often no.
UK workplaces where much more relaxed in comparison so even though people put in more hours the results were similar.
Yes bc now this worker works same 3-4 hours but 4 days instead of 5.
I do see more people with higher wages chose more for time off than more money, and work 4 days for example..But the majority of the population does not fit that category i think. (i dont have the exact numbers, but most jobs are not high income in general)
> (Honest disclaimer: I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble, no idea about blue collar to be honest. Not much contact with people from that field unfortunately)
Even ignoring your "BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While [...]" point - try talking to the farmers and blue collar workers upon whom your day-to-day life is critically dependent.
I don't think idleness is what's preventing it anyway. It's more about capital ownership. I'm not deploying high speed rail because I expect it would be impossible to get the land rights, not because I wouldn't work enough hours.
Actually I myself would be a terrible entrepreneur in any field, but I feel that I produce good value at a good rate at the actual work that I do. I don't think there's a shortage of entrepreneurship even though I happen to have none. I do think it's not being deployed on things that make the country more powerful.
You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
During the financial crises Greeks were getting a lot of criticism from Northern Europeans for being lazy but the reality was they did far more hours.
I have been practicing Buddhism for a while and it often is indescribably blissful to just sit in nature, feeling the wind in my hair and sun on my back.
Anyone can experience this door with just a little bit of practice and I encourage everyone to try.
(So, I suppose using "slack" in a positive sense by project management, while probably still being considered a pejorative thing by non technical management or beancounters...)
My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.
That's how I learned that forest ants, at least the local ones, are incredibly docile. I never got bothered by them.
Productivity needs purpose and direction, and you find those through pausing and looking around you.
This reminds me of our painting teacher randomly forcing the whole class to put their paintbrushes down, take a step back and see if their painting still makes sense. Otherwise you get stuck on details while your perspective is all wrong.
Mindfulness, contemplation, mediation, being at leisure, stillness, serenity, tranquility, repose...
How strong the connotations of laziness are with the word idle probably vary with context and culture, and I wonder how much ti has varied historically.
Idleness led to Taoism, the pursuit of being useless. Led to Buddhism: just sit.
As the quote sort of goes: The great preponderance of society’s problems come from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room by themselves.
It’s a noble pursuit, idleness. Really. If you haven’t tried it, give it a real shake. A little more might fall out than you expect.
I will once again recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, especially The Burnout Society.
The older I get, the more pointless I find the modern goal of productivity. If there is one asymptotic goal one should rather pursue, is to do the most with the least bit of effort. And it all circles back to the teachings of the Tao. Be like water, not like the machine.
Translations vary slightly.
It didn't help.
No, they exacerbated the problem. The point of the quote is not the being alone, but the doing nothing. All your examples just made it harder to do so because there’s always something you can distract yourself with. The point is that you should be able to be alone with your thoughts and nothing else.
Smart phones etc just prove that we can't sit quietly in a room alone.
We have all learned (especially men I think) that we define parts of ourselves through what we achieve. However, is that a good idea? Also, what counts towards that goal? Did I achieve something if I support a friend that struggles? Or do I only achieve something that can be added to my CV? Who am I trying to show what about me?
I absolutely love the idea of being idle. It strictly goes againt current societal developments, but I think it would do a lot of good for a lot of people. We don't have to perform all the time, we don't have to be perfect all the time. What's the end-goal anyway? Rich people, statistically speaking, are not more happy. Managers with 60 hours a week often suffer from depression or burnout. The only two valid reasons in my mind to work hard are: 1. bring in enough money to live comfortably (which unfortunately isn't achievable for many) and 2. do good for society. Meanwhile, most people are struggling to even get by and tech CEOs can buy a new fancy car every day and tell us how to deal with the disruptions they cause? They tell us how we can save the economy? Why us? What did we do for the economy to be bad? Did we start wars, increase the cost of oil, create a self-inflicted banking crisis? What's it to us anyway? We're the ones suffering in the end, regardless of what we do.
I also find it quite irritating that the comments started discussing geopolitical power conflicts regarding idleness.
Anyway, I'm going to shut down my computer now and enjoy the sun. Happy idleness guys!
In our modern society, however, we hear the phrase "time is money". So, if you are idle, you are not making money. Instead of being idle, you should be busy. "business" is good.
I learn this play of words in Spanish. Idle in Spanish is "ocio". Business in Spanish is "negocio". Thus negocio is the combination of words "negación" and "ocio". The phrase "negación del ocio" translates as "idleness denial/negation".
The people who are lauding the virtues of being idle probably have money, and are of the age where they’re past measuring success by body count.
Everyone struggles with it. Would be nice to have some societal hooks so that more people could be confidently serene
And then go about their day
The ability to be at peace, in my world view, stems first and foremost from the ability to be at peace with yourself. Being able to look in a mental mirror, and accepting the image staring back as yourself, warts and all. It's not exactly liking every last imperfection, rather not feeling guilty for not measuring up in all aspects to the ideals of a society or dreams of your younger self. Accepting that you are not the universal paragon and probably never will be, all the while not giving up on the idea of improving yourself.
Only when one can be locked in a room with oneself for a measure of time and not get in a fight, can we talk about being at peace with society and other external factors.
Lafarge wont come true with the quite large inequality of wealth and mankinds appetite for disteactions and general fear of silence and deep contemplation.
In the case of Europe much of generated wealth is wandering abroud (China: goods, US: digital services) so wealth doesn't get enough redistributed but is created somewhere else.
It’s common for people on their death beds to wish they had spent more time relaxing. It’s not common for anyone to wish they had spent more time working.
The sentiment you’re expressing has been sold to us for a long time, way before “agents” were a thing. “You have to work harder, pull yourself by your bootstraps, build a company, spend all your free time on side projects, …”. It’s a grift designed to keep you busy, selfish, and brain dead, oblivious to your own condition and the state of the world. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
>>“But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Paul Lafargue and his wife committed suicide—he was 69; she was 66. His reason, it seems to me, dovetailed with his philosophy”.
“Dovetailed”. Call me when an LLM will ever be able to pick and use such a perfect, yet statistically improbable, word to construct such a sentence.
> I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this.
Never is a long, long while for LLM development to catch up with hack journalism.
Determining if something’s AI generated just gives us another reason not to engage. Like solving a puzzle on the kids menu instead of eating the food on the plate
Why are you telling other people what to talk or not to talk about?
The freedom or ability to be lazy may be for a lucky few, but the right should be for all. A right doesn’t stop being a right when it’s not being observed, and when that happens it should be a warning to us all.
For example, access to clean water should be a right. But some communities don’t have it, and we should collectively help them. Due process is also a right, and when people are systematically captured from their communities and unilaterally stuck in a cell, we should collectively remove the power to do so from those who are doing it.