How to be Idle

Pick it up: If you’re in the mood for a thoughtful take on the way we live our lives. If you’re mulling a change in how you live and work. If you’re curious about the way the advent of industry has fundamentally changed us and our world, not always for the better.

This is a remarkable and very necessary book that is not so much about idleness as it is a call to examine our lives and our choices, and to do a better job of living than we currently do. Hodgkinson’s definition of idleness is not that we sit around and do nothing, but that we build enough down-time into our lives that we can make the time to think, to read, to reflect, to appreciate art, and to engage in rewarding and hands-on activities like cooking, gardening, engaging with the natural world, and having good times with friends and family, doing things that truly bring us joy.

While he is, on one level, speaking to us as individuals, what he offers is primarily a critique of the society we’ve built with its emphasis on discipline, self-sacrifice, hard work and the constant need to get ahead. The assumption being that the further we go up that career ladder, the happier we will be, which is, of course, not true. We’ve built a world in which everyone is rushed, and everyone is time-poor regardless of how resource rich they may be. And maybe what we need is not one more self-help book exhorting us to be more productive, but one that tells us to slow down, sleep in, and just be for a bit.

Hodgkinson contrasts the way we live and work now to the way people used to live and work in the pre-industrial age. This was the time before jobs were invented. People worked, but no one had a job at the centre of their lives, consuming most of their time, energy and attention. Living and working happened side by side. While he does not advocate that we turn back the clock, he makes the point that maybe we can learn from the past and figure out a way to build a society which works better for all of us.

The book is divided into 24 chapters, one for each hour of the day. Hodgkinson takes us through a typical weekday, and uses that as a frame to write about all the things that matter to him, like life in and around the home, time with friends, the joy of a leisurely lunch, the pleasure of drinking without one eye on the clock, the joys of fishing, the importance of sleep, conversation, meditation, holidays and more. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, but it is also funny, warm, engaging and a joy to read.