"How to be free" Tom Hodgkinson

And there are new enemies of leisure today. Hunger and
God have been replaced in the consumer age by
possessions and status. The advertising industry leads us to
believe that life will be improved by the purchase of a
product. The purchase of a product requires money. Money
requires hard work. Or debt. We go into debt to chase our
desires, and then keep working to pay the debt. It's the
modern form of indentured labour

Newspapers aren't much help to those pursuing an idle
life. They present themselves as independent, but since
they are funded by advertising, they do much to promote
the work-and-consume ethic. Newspapers offer a problem
and a solution. The problem is presented in the news pages
and consists of stories of war, starvation, political
corruption, death, famine, scandal, theft, abduction,
paedophilia. In short, they promote anxiety. The solution to
this anxiety is presented in the magazine sections, and
consists of editorial about - and, of course, advertising for - fridges, lighting systems, cars, sex advice, burglar
alarms, loans, insurance policies, recipes, rugs, scented
candles and various cultural products such as music, film
and books. Problem: anxiety. Solution: money. Method:
work.

God himself, argues Paul Lafargue in 'The Right
to be Lazy' , set a good example: after working for six
days, he rests for all eternity.

But tell your 

boss that you didn't come in till lunchtime because you 

were dreaming up some great new ideas for product 

development and he is unlikely to be very sympathetic. 

g too much that 

society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went 

to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs 

researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society 

doesn't allow us to be more idle. He replied: 

I think the reason we don't organise society in that 

way can be summed up in the aphorism, ' idle hands 

are the devil's tool'. In other words, institutions fear 

idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social 

situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that's 

almost a substitute word for idle, 'malcontent'. 

Essentially, we are all kept very busy ... under no 

circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents 

of your own mind. Freud called introspection 

'morbid' unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, 

possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. 

How much better life would be if we began the day with 

a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy. Newspapers are 

merely a negative diversion from the self, a bit like soap 

operas. The writer Marcel Theroux said to me on 9 January 

last year: 'I have been in great spirits this year, and I 

attribute this entirely to the fact that I have not read the 

Daily Telegraph for nine days. ' 

Oscar Wilde

Let me say to you now that to 

do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the 

world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. .. It 

is to do nothing that the elect exist. 

Knowing that Jenkins is sitting in double maths 

while you sit in a cafe with a cup of tea multiplies the 

pleasure a thousandfold. There is no fun in joining the frisbee-throwing hordes in the park on Saturday. The idler 

wants to be throwing frisbees while the hordes are 

suffering. Frisbee-throwing becomes incalculably more 

delicious under these conditions

As with all aspects of idleness, we should resist the 

pressure to reject the elements of our lives which do not fit 

into the productive, rational, busy paradigm that society 

and our own selves impose upon us. Learning how to live 

can involve learning how to love the hangover. This trick 

is for the advanced student of idleness, to be sure, but try it 

and see how your life improves

We might lay the blame, indeed, at the feet of the busy, 

restless, striving Americans. Right back in 1882, Nietzsche 

noted that lunch was under threat from the new work ethic 

in the US. 'The breathless haste with which they work, ' he 

wrote in The Gay Science, ' is already beginning to infect 

the old Europe ... One thinks with a watch in one's hand, 

even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the 

latest news of the stock-market; one lives as if one "might 

miss out on something"

Observing 1930s New York, Lin Yutang also 

complained that the speed of life was destroying the 

pleasure of eating. 'The tempo of modern life is such that 

we are giving less and less time and thought to the matter 

of cooking and feeding ... it is a pretty crazy life when one 

eats to work and does not work in order to eat.

No one has the time to eat at 

leisure, it seems. It's a common sight to see people 

snaffling down a burger or sandwich between stops on the 

underground. This kind of eating has something almost 

guilty and furtive about it. It's not eating, it's lonely 

refuelling. The same thing has happened to breakfast. 

Handy little bits of solid cereal called 'breakfast bars' 

advertise themselves with the slogan ' Good Food on the 

Go '. So much more efficient that way

But the cosy and entrepreneurial Seattle Coffee 

Company was wiped out when the vast Starbucks outfit 

bought all 65 of them in 1998, and these days every high 

street has its Costa, Starbucks, Aroma or Nero. Far from 

being loafing zones, these places are simply pit stops for 

working machines, petrol stations for human beings. As the 

writer lain Sinclair puts it: ' [Tlhe whole culture has 

speeded up so that people just queue to get takeaways. And 

it's the death of cafes. Who 's going to spend days hanging 

out at cafes? It's gone. '

Albert
Camus, for example, with typical Gallic morbidity,
describes illness as 'a remedy against death, because it
prepares us for death, creating an apprenticeship whose
first step is self-pity. Illness supports man in the great
attempt to shirk the fact that he will surely die. ' 

The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of
beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not
interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company
of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry,
godlike. He is free. Most of those, however, who stride
along the streets of our big cities are not enjoying their
stroll. They are merely using their legs to get from A to B.
There is no component of fun in their walk; it simply has to
be done. Their walking has a purpose in mind: to move from the underground station to the office, from bus stop to
factory, sandwich shop to bank. The journey itself is
unimportant, a waste of time. The goal is the important
thing. Caught up in this sort of walking, we find it hard to
abandon ourselves to the moment. We pace with purpose,
head down, staring at the pavement. Through our mind
runs a stream of anxieties: things to do, things not done,
commitments broken. If anyone saw us they would get the
vibe: busy, important, things to do, places to go. 

The beggar's life is idealized as one of freedom: from 

work, from desire, from consumer slavery. There is a truth 

to this, and it's a shame that today we see homeless people 

as simply victims who need to be helped. This may well be 

the case with many; but it is also possible that others have 

actually chosen to live this way. They would rather be 

homeless, poor and free than mortgaged, employed and 

enslaved. 

In Buddhism the beggar, the tramp, the vagabond is not 

a subject for reform or liberal hand-wringing, but, on the 

contrary, he represents an ideal of living, of pure living in 

the moment, of wandering without destination, of freedom 

from worldly care. 

'Most of the world 's troubles seem to come 

from people who are too busy' wrote Evelyn Waugh. ' If 

only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much 

happier we would all be. ' 

Those who take time off, who step back to look at the 

world, the lazy ones, the ones who can't be bothered, the 

writers, poets and musicians, these people do much to 

make life worth living in terms of producing a culture, but 

they tend not to get involved in the running of things, the 

management of the infrastructure, hospital bureaucracy, the 

education system, the local councils, the tax inspectorate. 

And this is because they find all that sort of thing so 

unutterably dull. Instead of trying to change the way other 

people live, they focus on transforming their own lives

Today's enemy, in the West at least, is not so much the 

governments as a new authority: consumer capitalism. 

But is rioting, though undeniably enjoyable, and an 

expression of the spirit of liberty, really worth it? 

Surveying the successive failures of revolutions, uprisings 

and riots over the last thousand years to install more 

humane laws or less interfering governments, one might 

conclude sadly that a better place to effect change is in 

oneself and in one's own immediate surroundings.

Gazing at the stars opens our minds to another reality, a 

mysterious eternal world, beyond material struggle. 

Despite the attempts of the rationalists to explain the stars 

as merely a constellation of suns light years away, we still 

revere them and revel in their mysteries. 

We feel small under the stars, yet paradoxically we feel 

more ourselves. We are who we are. 

But gazing heavenward is seen as a waste of time by our 

practical-minded rulers. Our very language makes a virtue 

of being stuck on the earth, and criticizes those with loftier 

aspirations. Bad: head in the clouds, starry-eyed, losing 

grip, not living in the real world, moon-faced loon, lunatic, 

airy-fairy, space cadet, away with the fairies, moonstruck, 

on another planet. Good: feet on the ground, anchored, 

down-to-earth, grounded, keeping your head down, getting 

a grip. 

Today we seem to have lost the art. We seldom remark
on someone's ' conversational eloquence' (as De Quincey
did of the legendary Victorian loafer Walking Stewart).
People now praise someone's energy and achievements,
and focus on the final result rather than the process. (David
Beckham, not noted for his powers of conversation, is a
global hero.) Then it's back to the grind. 

A life lived around parties can also make sober life seem 

dull by comparison, and leads to the unhealthy 

phenomenon of living for the weekend, while feeling 

depressed and powerless all week. The true idler wants to 

live a good life all the time, not just on Saturday nights, 

and the real lesson of hedonism is that we should attempt 

to enjoy all moments, not just those ones when we are out 

of our heads. Time should be savoured, not endured. 

Hedonism should provide ideas on how to live; it should 

not become a mode of living in itself, as it is unsustainable. 

The idler's desire is to live with no rules, or only rules 

that have been invented by himself. He wants to develop 

the inner strength to have complete power over himself. He 

refuses to hand over that power to any authority 

whatsoever, however benign that authority may appear to 

be. And the fewer rules there are, the less potential there is 

for transgressing them all the time and therefore wasting 

energy in guilt. It is easy to become, in the words of 

Thoreau, a 'slave-driver of yourself'. We create sets of 

behavioural rules for ourselves and then feel bad when we 

fail to live up to them. 

To make money, you can use all that time to start a 

business, pursue freelance projects, invent websites. My 

advice is to forget all the rubbish about having to specialize 

in one area and instead become a jack of all trades. Learn 

how to look after yourself. Paint, plumb, read, write, play 

music. Become average at many things rather than very 

good at one thing. 

If one of your projects takes off, and you earn some 

money, then great. But it's a good idea to learn to live on 

very little.