Intermittent idleness is appealing and even productive, as it often surfaces valuable ideas from your subconscious. That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text. Let's throw out our phones first, then we can experience true mental repose.
> That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text.
I have to leave home to read a book. Sitting on a park bench is the only way for me to focus and not get distracted. It’s great, though. We have a beautiful rose garden nearby. Lots of critters scurrying about.
I agree for the most part. DND isn't perfect, though. When you're bored, your mind naturally searches for things to do, and you'll be tempted to proactively check your lock screen, which unhelpfully informs you about "3 messages received while in Do Not Disturb." Now you really want to know what those messages are.
This is why I tend to keep my phone physically far away from me, and out of sight.
Less phone usage makes for less phone usage. It gets easier. Now I don't particularly care what the messages are if they come outside of my designated "message checking time."
Anecdotally, I'd give it 3 months of "reduced phone usage mindfulness." For further reading, check out the wikipedia article on ∆FosB expression, which is a gene expression which essentially tells your body to keep doing things that release dopamine. It takes about 3 months for the ∆FosB expression to decay.
It feels like there is no correct translation for it in English -- idleness carries connotations of laziness whereas a better way to think about it is being aware and present of the moment.
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.
I actually like that it does. I'm lazy, and that's not a bad thing. I show up to work every day and get the job done with bare minimal effort, and then I go home an laze around with the lazy dogs, lazy family, and lazy friends. There's nothing wrong with that, but some people think there is. That connotation is useful in identifying those people, because they aren't people that I want to associate with further.
I have never practiced Buddhism and it is still indescribably blissful to sit in a clearing in a forest, provided you aren't sitting on the wrong kind of anthill.
I've never seen it mentioned anywhere in their histories but I always suspected the messaging apps Slack and Discord were references to Church of Subgenius and Discordianism respectively
and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!
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.
Alternatively, ensuring you have enough slack in the schedule is, at least for some tech leads and project managers, an essential tool to enable meeting deadlines.
(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...)
yep, having some slack is the only way for someone / something to able to respond to uncertainty. technically having firefighter on standby and policemen on patrol are a form of slacking, and we (should) have no problem with that.
> It feels like there is no correct translation for it in English
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.
Agreed. Meditation and mindfulness have confirmed the importance of “being idle,” at least for me. Making an active effort to not be distracted by thought is quite the challenge, but it has brought me great peace.
You're a lot more likely to be aware in the present moment when you're deep in a 'flow' state doing something productive than when you're just sitting around doing nothing. Why do people assume that idleness is something to aim for, and enjoying real productive work is not?
Why do people(you, in this case, but this is a very common fallacy) assume that advocating for one thing(idleness) is implicitly advocating against its opposite(work)? We can do both, just not simultaneously.
Because the article's title is "The Importance of Being Idle" not The Importance of doing something that you enjoy"? It's all-too-easy to enjoy being idle, but ultimately it's also a bit mindless, and this deprives us of deeper forms of enjoyment and engagement.
it seems like you are interpreting this as an argument for "not doing work" - but it's not the case. It is more so saying that rest is important too. You ever have the experience that you are bashing your head against something, take a break to stop working on it, and come back refreshed and solve it quickly? Just because something is important, doesn't mean you should do that thing, single-mindedly, at the expense of other things.
I start my day with deliberate idleness. Just coffee and music in my living room, or tea on the balcony.
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.
The two states are in no way in opposition to each other. In fact, experiencing deep meditation can improve one's ability to get into that desired productive flow.
I started with “How to Be Idle” by Hodgkinson about 20 years ago. Found “The importance of living “ by Lin yutang.
I now have a small collection of books about idleness… yet here i am working and then throwing myself into working on a century house in my spare time… feeling starved for idleness. Yet my most creative ideas for it come when I’m idle.
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.
These essays on idleness, along with the more radical ones against work in general (love Bob Black’s take on it), have been great comfort to my tired soul.
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.
> Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem.
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.
You can microdose idleness. Be productive in general, but make time for doing nothing without guilt. I made it a habit to spend my first waking hour idle, and it feels great.
I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob.
(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)
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 …
Europe is not behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. This message that is being loudly broadcasted hides the real problem.
Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.
Issues like raising funds easily or faster bankruptcy processing are not something an ordinary European citizen can solve. These are leadership issues. The proliferation of consultants means that management talent is never developed. Avoiding accountability is rewarded.
Consistently what could become common wealth in form of company is sold to private equity or sold to US. Friction in movement of information is sheer incompetence at leadership level.
For years blue-collar jobs were being moved to China, while white-collar jobs were being moved to US. And now the workers are being blamed for not working hard enough. It is never asked - is there work?
I don't think the issue is the lack of good leadership.
Europe, and particularly the EU, is effectively governed by people who think like administrators. In politics, in business, and in the actual administration. On some level, this is a good thing. The core republican principle is that leaders should be disposable servants, because actual leaders never have the public's best interests in mind. Except maybe temporarily or by accident.
The problem is that administrators tend to propose administrative solutions to the issues they have identified. Because they think like administrators. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Most successes and failures of the EU can be traced back to this tendency to enact administrative solutions. There would be more successes and fewer failures if the administrators could somehow learn to predict when an administrative solution is not the right tool.
Housing markets, labor markets, and pension systems are regional, and the situation in each region is different. Capital markets are also regional to some extent, but perhaps they shouldn't be. Pay is a matter of perspective. You can say that Europeans lack well-paying jobs, or you can say that American middle class wages are low (relative to the wealth of the society), because their upper middle class wages are high.
European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are chosen by your societies at the ballot box.
look at the massive popular protests when Macron tried to do pension reform. These are completely legitimate choices to make, they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
The sad thing about democratic societies it is difficult to form a consensus on anything. So elections are won on either emotions or the minimally contentious manifesto. Each successive win on such a manifesto further lowers what will achieve consensus.
People will mesmerizing oratory skills are extremely rare. That such individuals choose politics as their career and then come up with appealing messaging at the right time is almost like solving 3-body problem.
You imply representative democracy, where political parties are forced to be formed not to solve issues, but to win a popular vote. To win the vote, you have to dilute your policy enough to encompass the masses by providing many common denominators. There, consensus is impossible by design, we no longer live in a Greek metropolis, where the dimensionality of problems is low. Todays societies are complex and have many dimensions, yet the representative democracies group all of the similar and dissimilar issues under 2-3-4-5 different parties.
I see exactly two (one) solutions:
- people go beyond party boundaries and cooperate on issues they feel important (doesn't work, it's already possible on paper, but in the best case this ability is traded for negotiational power)
- direct voting on issues, parties only serve a directional and educational role
they did not manage to stop the law. what i am saying is that the leaders were trying to pass a necessary law and the population was against it, so you can't pass off blame for the dysfunction on them
The best way to understand European policy is that at a high level they want to establish a quota system both within Europe and globally.
The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.
In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.
This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.
Federalism is a strength not a weakness. This desire for control at highest levels is what made WW2 horrors acceptable.
Our problem is incoherence and slow reaction to reality. We either often not experiment or avoid replicating a success. We lack agility in our rule making.
> This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics
This is a very strange suggestion. The US federal government is not a beacon of best governance. And especially now with Trump, there won't be any takers for this.
It's certainly an untenable idea, and while I'd agree that the US isn't the best beacon of governance today, I'd also argue that the EU as a whole has not been either and most of the problems are obscured from English-speaking Americans because we don't have the time or language capacity to understand all of the nuance and problems for each member state. It's hard to understand.
On the other hand, the US is big time. We're always on the front page, and so Europeans of course begin to believe they know a lot about American politics and thoughts because they read about it all the time. That leads to outlandish understandings and expectations of the US and so even when you want to start looking at governance comparisons it's hard to have conversations because "defenders" of American systems don't know enough about the EU and European "defenders" of the EU think they know quite a bit about American politics. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, unfortunately.
The reality is that both systems have pros and cons, and how good each system is really depends on individual circumstances, and even then those circumstances and pros/cons change over time.
To keep the fun part of the conversation going, I actually think the United States and the rest of the Anglosphere should join together in one bloc. Sometimes I fantasize about how different and perhaps better history would have turned out had the American Revolution not happened.
You are right. European civil society does not reward initiative and so its political class chooses to mislead than bring clarity. Work is not rewarded.
From recent events, I like giving example of Deutschland Ticket. The German transport minister during 2020/2021 took a huge political risk of challenging existing system, made life much more easier for normal person. What happened to his political career? The guy is nowhere to be seen.
> Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.
Sounds like Europe is behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. You just point to poor leadership as the cause.
Seems you came with a preconceived opinion. Know that working harder does not pay in Europe. So people do not. The incentives are not aligned. Leaders design incentives, not normal people.
European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not the issue.
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.
> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats.
Why is that a problem? Yes, it means less "amazing individuals who own N% of the economy", but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare, definitively a tradeoff I (and most people I'm proud to call friends) are willing to make, even if it makes our own lives a small percentage less comfortable.
I'd say that why I personally prefer the (European) country over other places I've lived in the world, or could live. I don't want to live in a place where people don't help lifting all the boats, but instead are just interested in lifting their own boat, or want to lift a small amount of boats.
>>but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare
And that's amazing, and as an European I would never want to get rid of that. It's a cornerstone of our societies, a core belief if you want to call it that.
But I do think that there is a pervasive feeling of people being "ostracized" for wanting to do better than their neighbours. Like when someone says they are going to run a company the reaction is usually "why, isn't a normal job good enough for you?". Obviously this isn't universal, EU is far too big and diverse for this to be true everywhere. But I've met with this kind of attitude a lot personally, where people have directly asked me if I think I'm better than them by trying to do something good for myself and grow. So now I just don't tell people, or just say I work in software or something, there's no point. It's not even that tide lifts all boats, it's that "we're all in the same boat"(and don't you dare leave it) is a thing that exists.
That's definitively true in some parts of Europe, more so in some parts than others. Growing up in Sweden, I for sure felt the effects of that, it's very much "Sit down in the boat and do your part" with any sentiments outside of that being relatively uncommon, unless you happen to live in one of the bubbles of the metropolitan areas. But essentially any rural area I've visited either in my mother country or any other country in Europe had that mindset or hints of it.
But to be fair, I haven't really experienced that so much in other larger countries like Spain, France or Italy, at least not to that extent. Still I'd say it's different than the typical American Individual Exceptionalism, but probably a good difference, we don't to make the same mistake.
Probably a balance between the two is the right approach, you don't want to completely lack either sides, but also not be too dogmatic about it. But it's also hard for politicians to get votes on "You know, both sides have good points, lets figure out a balance", strong emotions sell votes and so on...
Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.
Even those who might accept this is no longer true intellectually find it hard to internalise.
I don't think that's the current problem. It was up to, perhaps, the Suez crisis or up until decolonisation, but since then I think we've mostly internalised that America (and more recently China) have been the leading powers.
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.
While Europe internalised that the US was the super power, it did not internationalise that the West was no longer dominant. It has also not understood its diminishing importance to the US in the world in which its economy is proportionately so much smaller, and the rival superpower is in Asia, not Europe.
Spending on defence is expensive, but its a lot cheaper than an actual war - "if you want peace, prepare for war"
War is very expensive, but it also creates tons of jobs in supply. In ideal world its a fools errand, in reality if you dont have a mighty force to defend yourself and deter enemy, you can be easily taken over. Even a big well funded military is a paper tiger at best if it never experienced complex combat, maintaining supply lines etc.
Thats the only thing that works for the likes of russia (or anybody really) who is by far the biggest threat to Europe and would love to see it subjugated.
That was also the only reason Switzerland wasnt taken over by nazi Germany like Austria was, they mustered up to 800k voluntees/draftees in a country of 5 million, fortified and made it clear that Germany would bleed hard to gain that territory (they would invade anyway after defeating russia that was clear also from hitler&himmler's writings, top german brass hated Switzerland, what it represented and considered it a mortal enemy to 3rd reich but I am going off topic here).
5% is nothing if there is enough motivation. Overbuilt bureaucracy for nothing juse employing tons of rather useless paper pushers, ineffective social systems that are abused hard by those really not deserving it, bad budget management by politicians, corruption in megaprojects and ao on. Its really nothing.
Why should we care to be "at the top"? The average person gets no benefit from this; on the contrary, they would do a lot better if underperforming countries in Europe's neighborhood raised their standards of living.
I agree with you about "at the top" in terms of being a global power. It does people little good.
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.
Poverty levels are roughly the same between Vietnam and the US from a quick search. Mean standard of living is a poor way to calculate inequality. If you have a link to a median one it would help to compare.
> 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.
Not sure if up to date anymore, but if you look at some samples like here, at equivalent adjusted income levels, people across the world have similar standards of living regardless of where they live.
What is equivalent adjusted income level? PPP between Russia and USA is around 1.8. Median annual salary in the US is $57 ($1196 per week), median salary in Russia is $13200. Even if you adjust it, it's roughly two times smaller.
As someone who lived in a bunch of countries, some rich and some poor, no, living standards among the avg. Joes of the world are not even remotely the same.
I always found it interesting that homeless folks in the US seem to live in tents a lot of the time, but in my country they rarely have more than a piece of cardboard. I don't know if my perception is incorrect, or if I'm ready too much into this, but my conclusion has been basically what you said: at every socio-economic level, the people at that level have higher standards of living in developed countries than in developing countries.
It’s really hard to compare when you get down to it, even if you ignore “homeless” as a category.
Using money as a proxy doesn’t work perfectly because things can be more expensive, and trying to normalize with things like “living sq ft” doesn’t calculate externalities.
The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
Excellent points. In my small island country, prices mostly come down to being labor-dominant or material-dominant. The former is cheaper* than the developed world, whereas the latter is more expensive* than the developed world.
*compared using nominal exchange
>The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
I like this approach. It's much more holistic and captures stuff that really cannot be quantified with prices and numbers, like freedoms and rights.
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.
"The average person gets no benefit from this" this is a very bad take.
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.
> Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.
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 think a lot of people would welcome some disruption. This is why there has been a rise in populist parties which appeal because they promise something different.
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.
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.
If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.
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.
My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.
At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.
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.
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?
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.)
>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.
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.
The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.
But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.
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.
The Americans are keeping the seas open for their own self-interest, and this is great. Other countries in the broader West do also chip in with their own military assets. Why should Maersk have a problem with this?
Americans seems to be intent to cause as much damage to everyone including themselves.
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.
It was not token help, that part is complete lie. It was real help and real European soldiers died. Including the ones from Denmark which was threatened by Trump. Or especially from Denmark, Denmark had the highest loss per capita within the coalition forces.
My biggest issue with Europe is not that we work less. I lived in the US for a while, and I can confirm they stay longer in the office but get the same amount done.
My biggest issue is that we have focused for too long on managing (regulating) and redistributing wealth instead of creating new sources of wealth.
We are obsessed with slicing and controlling the pie instead of creating new ones for everybody.
That mindset might cost us the future of our children.
Is there a point where enough (per capita) wealth has been created? Where there is enough pie to go around for everyone, and we have no need to create more pies?
I am sure we can all argue about where that point is, but I wonder if we agree that there is such a point? Or do we have to keep increasing our wealth forever?
It's not that Europeans embracing being idle. It's that they realized typical white collar workers hardly produce any value (unlike Americans who still pretend they do) so it makes no difference for them to work less than 40 hours per week.
Junior doctors across Europe reported working an average of 57 ± 17 hours per week (216 ± 61 hours per month)[0].
Junior doctors slave away for senior doctors so that they can one day become senior doctors with 10x the pay and have junior doctors do most of their work. That’s not going to happen for the average white collar worker.
As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
I am honestly curious who you are pointing at (in particular if you exclude British leaders)
Partly because I am actually curious, I don't doubt there are bad leaders.
But partly also because, without any details, this is a very general trope, that I don't really think is very healthy at the moment. Since it is food for right wing extremists (you probably know yourself where some politicians in USA originate from).
While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:
bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)
bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material
bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?
There is also a general mindset of worklife balance and enjoyment from life.
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. ).
> Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally.
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.
I think it’s more that at a certain income, you kind of plateau. You can afford all the little pleasures you want, but you couldn’t meaningfully improve your life without doubling your income. It would not get you a nicer apartment, would not make a house more affordable, and would not give you more time to enjoy travelling.
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.
It’s a mixed blessing. I am Canadian, and I prefer my quiet life and small flat to always being at work or mowing the lawn. I am always stunned to see how much people back home work. My friends in Germany have much more balanced lives.
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.
This is all about how the housing market is structured, not the amount worked. If people worked even more, house prices would rise further to cancel it.
Is this actually a problem? We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office. The average - everywhere - is more like the equivalent of 20 hours of solid focused work per week day.
Does more white collar work beyond a threshold produce more value, anyway? Sometimes yes but often no.
interesting. want to say most people i know, same countries, works more than 40 hrs a week. It really depends on your circles i guess, this perception.
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.
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.
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.
I'm guessing he means actual time physically working, not the theoretical time in the contract.
It really depends on your bubble but a lot of people have "full time" contracts (meaning 40-ish hours) but real hours vary. You can come later, leave earlier, go do something else in the day, and don't have to report it to anyone. Just make sure you're not missing a meeting and deliver what's needed on time. So in practice you end up working fewer hours on average, as long as you can produce enough on average (which honestly isn't hard in many large organisations, and hard to measure).
Boy does that resonate with my current feeling.
I've spent the last maybe 18 months constantly working, paid, non-paid, voluntary work, side-projects, etc. I almost feel like I'm confusing myself with the amount of work/different projects I have. All while whenever I find an hour or two to just sit idle in the sun, I feel the very best, happy almost. No, I have nothing to show for this time, I can't go to bed with the feeling I've achieved something, I wasn't productive. But I feel.. good?
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!
I don't know... I know a few people who inherited enough money to be idle and they don't seem particularly happy with their idleness. Could of course be the social pressure we live in, and that could change if we're all idle.
It's conditioning. We cannot be happy idle because society deems idleness as bad. Just like people cannot be happy with a balding hairline because society has deemed it to be ugly. If the trend changes in a century and balding is suddenly hot then the same people would be happy.
It’s all about sex. Being idle typically means being poor. Try being in the dating market when you’re poor. Being bald means being middle aged which is also a big negative in the dating market.
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.
I have a few unemployed hipster friends who get laid a fair amount because their idleness enables them to go to hipster parties where they meet other idle hipsters to have sex with.
I'd argue that overall, having a job, unless it's a job that can easily get you laid (barman/barmaid, working in a shop, especially if you're a heterosexual male working in a clothes shop with an 80+% female clientele, music/artistic performance) is a net negative for your sex life. Working 60 hours/week in a tech company office, if you're a heterosexual male, is probably not as conductive to your sex life as being an unemployed bum who spends a couple of hours a day wandering the streets of a large city talking to strangers. Obviously, if you're a heterosexual female, being paid to be around a bunch of males in a tech office is probably going to massively help you get laid, but I think the key variable is just "number of potential partners encountered", not employment status.
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.
As you mention Lafarge. I think his fallacy and other theorists of its time and school of thinking was mankinds natural sense of enough os enough.
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.
We need more businesses run like the co-op models in some European countries where the workers own a large percentage of the business. Or those rare, profitable US companies that are privately held and offer significant ownership stake to their employees with upside (not fake startup options).
I don't expect to ever be in that position, but I couldn't imagine becoming a multimillionaire off the backs of my employees and to keep on stacking more money than I could ever spend just to feel like I'm still winning.
Point is, there's enough money being made to employ just about everyone and at fewer than 40 hours a week, but instead we have multi billionaires with more money than a dozen generations could spend.
This whole essay very strongly resonates with the anti-natalistic movement. The fact the protagonist of the story kills himself adds to this in a very unmistakable manner.
In a similar vain, I currently enjoy reading A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros. Gros draws the musing of various philosophers on walking. To me, his description of the slow beat of the footstep that propels imagination resonates with how walking works for me. When I'm stuck on something and feel I need to keep pushing towards a solution, a short break, often the result of an obligatory walk/ride to the train station, already sets my mind in motion.
Crucial is that the walk is not an intentional break for the purpose of brainstorming, because then my thoughts stay stuck. Such walking is 'idle' in the sense that it is an almost automatic process. The whole point is that walking/idling should not be a productivity tool.
It is very important to have the time and freedom to be idle.
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".
It is really thought provoking. Interesting how lafargue saw machines as a path to freedom, yet today we fear them for the opposite reason. Maybe the real issuen't AI replacing work, but our inability to redefine what "valuable time" looks like without it.
The issue is that he saw machines as working for the greater good of all, yet the reality we have are machines working for the benefit of a select few, who use that advantage to perpetuate the system where they are at the top and everyone is below. We have the technology to feed and clothe everyone and live comfortably, just not the collective will. Too many of us have been sold the fake idea that “everyone can make it” but individually. That you should be selfish and trample over others for your own personal success, instead of defining success as helping everyone do better.
This is so full of holes I don't even know where to start. But the main one is that you have a false dichotomy in assuming that individual success and "helping everyone do better" are mutually exclusive. For example, see the free market economy of the past 250 years.
> This is so full of holes I don't even know where to start.
I recommend you start by understanding the argument instead of straw manning it.
> But the main one is that you have a false dichotomy in assuming that individual success and "helping everyone do better" are mutually exclusive.
So your main objection against my point is an argument I haven’t made? There is a canyon of difference between “we have been sold idea X” and “idea Y and Z are incompatible”. Of course you can have individual success while helping everyone do better, because if you help everyone do better you also help yourself. That’s obvious, you are part of everyone.
> For example, see the free market economy of the past 250 years.
Yeah, that really helps everyone, that one there. No problems whatsoever that anyone can think of.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like: Head-Trapped – Descartes, Dawkins, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, Darwin, And The Myth Of Western Civilisation.
> Marx, then, argued that the more we subordinate our creative needs to dead capital and its goals, the less we are. But this is also true when we subordinate our creative needs to revolutionary goals in the future. Why? Because the future is non-existential, it does not exist; it is as dead as capital.
I feel like right now is the worst time to be idle. Stopping to smell the roses or lie on the grass when you could be spinning up agents and burning tokens means you'll be left in the dust.
Oh you will, will you? And what, pray tell, happens in this dust you’re left in? What’s the reward for working so hard right now? More work? What a rotten deal.
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.
I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this.
This is extraordinarily written. It is etymologically out of the average.
It’s complex. Concepts intertwine and build on each other.
The linguistic choices are unusual but perfectly placed.
>>“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.
If you’re picking apart sentences looking for signs of AI then you’re already rotted. Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.
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
We can't read everything, so we need markers of taste to figure out what is and isn't worth engaging with. AI tells are markers of drastically bad taste.
Otium refers to leisure, not laziness. And leisure in the classical sense is not idling, but rather activity that is not "servile", but rather free. So, for example, contemplation and the study of philosophy in pursuit of wisdom, with no immediate practical or instrumental aim, would be an example of leisure. Indeed, the opposite of otium is negotium, which is to say the negation of leisure. This supports the idea that classically, work was seen as subordinate to leisure and indeed something that was supposed to enable leisure. Today, we rather think of leisure as a recuperation from labor to which we must inevitably return. In Greek, we see something similar: schole meaning "leisure", and its negation ascholia meaning "busyness".
Josef Pieper wrote "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" [0], a book on this subject that people should read. John Paul II also wrote an encyclical, "Laborem Exercens" [1], that discusses, among other things, the purpose and nature of work and responds to both communist and capitalist views on the subject.
its a good idea in theory. But capitalists will make sure this does not happen because greed is never ending. today its AI, 10 years down the line it something else. Hence i think the right to be lazy is for a lucky few.
> Hence i think the right to be lazy is for a lucky few.
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.
Intermittent idleness is appealing and even productive, as it often surfaces valuable ideas from your subconscious. That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text. Let's throw out our phones first, then we can experience true mental repose.
> That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text.
I have to leave home to read a book. Sitting on a park bench is the only way for me to focus and not get distracted. It’s great, though. We have a beautiful rose garden nearby. Lots of critters scurrying about.
Perpetual Do Not Disturb is a better stopgap
I agree for the most part. DND isn't perfect, though. When you're bored, your mind naturally searches for things to do, and you'll be tempted to proactively check your lock screen, which unhelpfully informs you about "3 messages received while in Do Not Disturb." Now you really want to know what those messages are.
This is why I tend to keep my phone physically far away from me, and out of sight.
Less phone usage makes for less phone usage. It gets easier. Now I don't particularly care what the messages are if they come outside of my designated "message checking time."
Anecdotally, I'd give it 3 months of "reduced phone usage mindfulness." For further reading, check out the wikipedia article on ∆FosB expression, which is a gene expression which essentially tells your body to keep doing things that release dopamine. It takes about 3 months for the ∆FosB expression to decay.
In my experience turning off my phone solves the temptation to check it. The friction of having to turn on my phone is small but apparently enough.
It feels like there is no correct translation for it in English -- idleness carries connotations of laziness whereas a better way to think about it is being aware and present of the moment.
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.
> idleness carries connotations of laziness
I actually like that it does. I'm lazy, and that's not a bad thing. I show up to work every day and get the job done with bare minimal effort, and then I go home an laze around with the lazy dogs, lazy family, and lazy friends. There's nothing wrong with that, but some people think there is. That connotation is useful in identifying those people, because they aren't people that I want to associate with further.
I have never practiced Buddhism and it is still indescribably blissful to sit in a clearing in a forest, provided you aren't sitting on the wrong kind of anthill.
I would love to do this except I'm a magnet for bugs. My bliss only lasts 5 minutes or so.
Is there a right kind of anthill to sit on?
In my area, the wrong kind of anthill contains anything in the genus Myrmecia, and the right kind contains almost anything else.
I used to play on top of a giant (for a kid me, anyway) anthill in a nearby forest.
That's how I learned that forest ants, at least the local ones, are incredibly docile. I never got bothered by them.
Bullet ants, on the other hand, are not fun. Not even a little bit.
If you’re an ant, sure!
There's a Far Side cartoon in that
"Oh boy, look at that all that melting ice cream.. I hope he sits on our anthill!"
black ants, cuz they tickle the nethers instead of biting them
The jargon term, slack, comes to mind, in the concept-cluster of the old Google 20%-time, Slackware Linux, and Church of the SubGenius.
I've never seen it mentioned anywhere in their histories but I always suspected the messaging apps Slack and Discord were references to Church of Subgenius and Discordianism respectively
and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!
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.
In general use though slack has an even stronger connotation of e.g. slacking off and not doing anything useful with the time.
Alternatively, ensuring you have enough slack in the schedule is, at least for some tech leads and project managers, an essential tool to enable meeting deadlines.
(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...)
yep, having some slack is the only way for someone / something to able to respond to uncertainty. technically having firefighter on standby and policemen on patrol are a form of slacking, and we (should) have no problem with that.
Slackers! You're all slackers! [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEsNiV8e4ko
I think I would say a better variant would be "the importance of being still"
As a french I like the term "idle", as the state my computer switch to when i'm not asking it anything.
It’s interesting that it mostly translates to paresseux (lazy) and not the more obscure oisif (leisurly idleness)
> It feels like there is no correct translation for it in English
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.
Agreed. Meditation and mindfulness have confirmed the importance of “being idle,” at least for me. Making an active effort to not be distracted by thought is quite the challenge, but it has brought me great peace.
You're a lot more likely to be aware in the present moment when you're deep in a 'flow' state doing something productive than when you're just sitting around doing nothing. Why do people assume that idleness is something to aim for, and enjoying real productive work is not?
Why do people(you, in this case, but this is a very common fallacy) assume that advocating for one thing(idleness) is implicitly advocating against its opposite(work)? We can do both, just not simultaneously.
Because the article's title is "The Importance of Being Idle" not The Importance of doing something that you enjoy"? It's all-too-easy to enjoy being idle, but ultimately it's also a bit mindless, and this deprives us of deeper forms of enjoyment and engagement.
it seems like you are interpreting this as an argument for "not doing work" - but it's not the case. It is more so saying that rest is important too. You ever have the experience that you are bashing your head against something, take a break to stop working on it, and come back refreshed and solve it quickly? Just because something is important, doesn't mean you should do that thing, single-mindedly, at the expense of other things.
Two things can be important
I start my day with deliberate idleness. Just coffee and music in my living room, or tea on the balcony.
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.
The two states are in no way in opposition to each other. In fact, experiencing deep meditation can improve one's ability to get into that desired productive flow.
I started with “How to Be Idle” by Hodgkinson about 20 years ago. Found “The importance of living “ by Lin yutang. I now have a small collection of books about idleness… yet here i am working and then throwing myself into working on a century house in my spare time… feeling starved for idleness. Yet my most creative ideas for it come when I’m idle.
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.
These essays on idleness, along with the more radical ones against work in general (love Bob Black’s take on it), have been great comfort to my tired soul.
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.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
Translations vary slightly.
It's hard to escape the tick-tock of time slipping away, even if there's no clock in the room
Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before.
It didn't help.
> Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem.
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.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's *inability* to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
Smart phones etc just prove that we can't sit quietly in a room alone.
How is that quiet or alone? Stuff you listed is exactly the perfect enemy of what Pascal meant.
You can microdose idleness. Be productive in general, but make time for doing nothing without guilt. I made it a habit to spend my first waking hour idle, and it feels great.
I prefer to microdose work.
Reading Lin as a teenager made me want to visit China, where I met my wife. Thanks Lin!
I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob. (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)
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
Europe is not behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. This message that is being loudly broadcasted hides the real problem.
Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.
Issues like raising funds easily or faster bankruptcy processing are not something an ordinary European citizen can solve. These are leadership issues. The proliferation of consultants means that management talent is never developed. Avoiding accountability is rewarded.
Consistently what could become common wealth in form of company is sold to private equity or sold to US. Friction in movement of information is sheer incompetence at leadership level.
For years blue-collar jobs were being moved to China, while white-collar jobs were being moved to US. And now the workers are being blamed for not working hard enough. It is never asked - is there work?
I don't think the issue is the lack of good leadership.
Europe, and particularly the EU, is effectively governed by people who think like administrators. In politics, in business, and in the actual administration. On some level, this is a good thing. The core republican principle is that leaders should be disposable servants, because actual leaders never have the public's best interests in mind. Except maybe temporarily or by accident.
The problem is that administrators tend to propose administrative solutions to the issues they have identified. Because they think like administrators. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Most successes and failures of the EU can be traced back to this tendency to enact administrative solutions. There would be more successes and fewer failures if the administrators could somehow learn to predict when an administrative solution is not the right tool.
Housing markets, labor markets, and pension systems are regional, and the situation in each region is different. Capital markets are also regional to some extent, but perhaps they shouldn't be. Pay is a matter of perspective. You can say that Europeans lack well-paying jobs, or you can say that American middle class wages are low (relative to the wealth of the society), because their upper middle class wages are high.
European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are chosen by your societies at the ballot box.
look at the massive popular protests when Macron tried to do pension reform. These are completely legitimate choices to make, they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
The sad thing about democratic societies it is difficult to form a consensus on anything. So elections are won on either emotions or the minimally contentious manifesto. Each successive win on such a manifesto further lowers what will achieve consensus.
People will mesmerizing oratory skills are extremely rare. That such individuals choose politics as their career and then come up with appealing messaging at the right time is almost like solving 3-body problem.
> about democratic societies
You imply representative democracy, where political parties are forced to be formed not to solve issues, but to win a popular vote. To win the vote, you have to dilute your policy enough to encompass the masses by providing many common denominators. There, consensus is impossible by design, we no longer live in a Greek metropolis, where the dimensionality of problems is low. Todays societies are complex and have many dimensions, yet the representative democracies group all of the similar and dissimilar issues under 2-3-4-5 different parties.
I see exactly two (one) solutions:
- people go beyond party boundaries and cooperate on issues they feel important (doesn't work, it's already possible on paper, but in the best case this ability is traded for negotiational power)
- direct voting on issues, parties only serve a directional and educational role
> Macron tried to do pension reform > they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.
What fanfic am I reading here? The protests had no impact on the course of the pension reform.
they did not manage to stop the law. what i am saying is that the leaders were trying to pass a necessary law and the population was against it, so you can't pass off blame for the dysfunction on them
The best way to understand European policy is that at a high level they want to establish a quota system both within Europe and globally.
The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.
In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.
This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.
Federalism is a strength not a weakness. This desire for control at highest levels is what made WW2 horrors acceptable.
Our problem is incoherence and slow reaction to reality. We either often not experiment or avoid replicating a success. We lack agility in our rule making.
Why are you arguing for EU member states to become US territories instead of EU states just federalizing?
> This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics
This is a very strange suggestion. The US federal government is not a beacon of best governance. And especially now with Trump, there won't be any takers for this.
It's certainly an untenable idea, and while I'd agree that the US isn't the best beacon of governance today, I'd also argue that the EU as a whole has not been either and most of the problems are obscured from English-speaking Americans because we don't have the time or language capacity to understand all of the nuance and problems for each member state. It's hard to understand.
On the other hand, the US is big time. We're always on the front page, and so Europeans of course begin to believe they know a lot about American politics and thoughts because they read about it all the time. That leads to outlandish understandings and expectations of the US and so even when you want to start looking at governance comparisons it's hard to have conversations because "defenders" of American systems don't know enough about the EU and European "defenders" of the EU think they know quite a bit about American politics. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, unfortunately.
The reality is that both systems have pros and cons, and how good each system is really depends on individual circumstances, and even then those circumstances and pros/cons change over time.
To keep the fun part of the conversation going, I actually think the United States and the rest of the Anglosphere should join together in one bloc. Sometimes I fantasize about how different and perhaps better history would have turned out had the American Revolution not happened.
Re leadership: none of my smart friends wants to be politician. Maybe that’s the root cause.
You are right. European civil society does not reward initiative and so its political class chooses to mislead than bring clarity. Work is not rewarded.
From recent events, I like giving example of Deutschland Ticket. The German transport minister during 2020/2021 took a huge political risk of challenging existing system, made life much more easier for normal person. What happened to his political career? The guy is nowhere to be seen.
> Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.
Sounds like Europe is behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. You just point to poor leadership as the cause.
Seems you came with a preconceived opinion. Know that working harder does not pay in Europe. So people do not. The incentives are not aligned. Leaders design incentives, not normal people.
European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not the issue.
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.
> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats.
Why is that a problem? Yes, it means less "amazing individuals who own N% of the economy", but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare, definitively a tradeoff I (and most people I'm proud to call friends) are willing to make, even if it makes our own lives a small percentage less comfortable.
I'd say that why I personally prefer the (European) country over other places I've lived in the world, or could live. I don't want to live in a place where people don't help lifting all the boats, but instead are just interested in lifting their own boat, or want to lift a small amount of boats.
>>but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare
And that's amazing, and as an European I would never want to get rid of that. It's a cornerstone of our societies, a core belief if you want to call it that.
But I do think that there is a pervasive feeling of people being "ostracized" for wanting to do better than their neighbours. Like when someone says they are going to run a company the reaction is usually "why, isn't a normal job good enough for you?". Obviously this isn't universal, EU is far too big and diverse for this to be true everywhere. But I've met with this kind of attitude a lot personally, where people have directly asked me if I think I'm better than them by trying to do something good for myself and grow. So now I just don't tell people, or just say I work in software or something, there's no point. It's not even that tide lifts all boats, it's that "we're all in the same boat"(and don't you dare leave it) is a thing that exists.
That's definitively true in some parts of Europe, more so in some parts than others. Growing up in Sweden, I for sure felt the effects of that, it's very much "Sit down in the boat and do your part" with any sentiments outside of that being relatively uncommon, unless you happen to live in one of the bubbles of the metropolitan areas. But essentially any rural area I've visited either in my mother country or any other country in Europe had that mindset or hints of it.
But to be fair, I haven't really experienced that so much in other larger countries like Spain, France or Italy, at least not to that extent. Still I'd say it's different than the typical American Individual Exceptionalism, but probably a good difference, we don't to make the same mistake.
Probably a balance between the two is the right approach, you don't want to completely lack either sides, but also not be too dogmatic about it. But it's also hard for politicians to get votes on "You know, both sides have good points, lets figure out a balance", strong emotions sell votes and so on...
Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.
Even those who might accept this is no longer true intellectually find it hard to internalise.
I don't think that's the current problem. It was up to, perhaps, the Suez crisis or up until decolonisation, but since then I think we've mostly internalised that America (and more recently China) have been the leading powers.
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.
While Europe internalised that the US was the super power, it did not internationalise that the West was no longer dominant. It has also not understood its diminishing importance to the US in the world in which its economy is proportionately so much smaller, and the rival superpower is in Asia, not Europe.
Spending on defence is expensive, but its a lot cheaper than an actual war - "if you want peace, prepare for war"
War is very expensive, but it also creates tons of jobs in supply. In ideal world its a fools errand, in reality if you dont have a mighty force to defend yourself and deter enemy, you can be easily taken over. Even a big well funded military is a paper tiger at best if it never experienced complex combat, maintaining supply lines etc.
Thats the only thing that works for the likes of russia (or anybody really) who is by far the biggest threat to Europe and would love to see it subjugated.
That was also the only reason Switzerland wasnt taken over by nazi Germany like Austria was, they mustered up to 800k voluntees/draftees in a country of 5 million, fortified and made it clear that Germany would bleed hard to gain that territory (they would invade anyway after defeating russia that was clear also from hitler&himmler's writings, top german brass hated Switzerland, what it represented and considered it a mortal enemy to 3rd reich but I am going off topic here).
5% is nothing if there is enough motivation. Overbuilt bureaucracy for nothing juse employing tons of rather useless paper pushers, ineffective social systems that are abused hard by those really not deserving it, bad budget management by politicians, corruption in megaprojects and ao on. Its really nothing.
Why should we care to be "at the top"? The average person gets no benefit from this; on the contrary, they would do a lot better if underperforming countries in Europe's neighborhood raised their standards of living.
I agree with you about "at the top" in terms of being a global power. It does people little good.
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.
> The average person gets no benefit from this
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.
Poverty levels are roughly the same between Vietnam and the US from a quick search. Mean standard of living is a poor way to calculate inequality. If you have a link to a median one it would help to compare.
>Poverty levels are roughly the same between Vietnam and the US from a quick search.
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.
> 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.
Not sure if up to date anymore, but if you look at some samples like here, at equivalent adjusted income levels, people across the world have similar standards of living regardless of where they live.
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
> at equivalent adjusted income levels
What is equivalent adjusted income level? PPP between Russia and USA is around 1.8. Median annual salary in the US is $57 ($1196 per week), median salary in Russia is $13200. Even if you adjust it, it's roughly two times smaller.
As someone who lived in a bunch of countries, some rich and some poor, no, living standards among the avg. Joes of the world are not even remotely the same.
Relative poverty is real, but absolute poverty is a whole lot worse.
I choose to live in a richer country where I am relatively a lot poorer, but overall the advantages of a rich country outweigh the disadvantages.
I always found it interesting that homeless folks in the US seem to live in tents a lot of the time, but in my country they rarely have more than a piece of cardboard. I don't know if my perception is incorrect, or if I'm ready too much into this, but my conclusion has been basically what you said: at every socio-economic level, the people at that level have higher standards of living in developed countries than in developing countries.
It’s really hard to compare when you get down to it, even if you ignore “homeless” as a category.
Using money as a proxy doesn’t work perfectly because things can be more expensive, and trying to normalize with things like “living sq ft” doesn’t calculate externalities.
The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
Excellent points. In my small island country, prices mostly come down to being labor-dominant or material-dominant. The former is cheaper* than the developed world, whereas the latter is more expensive* than the developed world.
*compared using nominal exchange
>The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
I like this approach. It's much more holistic and captures stuff that really cannot be quantified with prices and numbers, like freedoms and rights.
> but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich
No, you need more than one goat if you want to be rich, regardless of what other people have. Really, you need a few dozen.
One goat can't do anything but age and die.
> Poverty levels
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.
"The average person gets no benefit from this" this is a very bad take.
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.
Ah, the good old "trickle down" theory of Thatcher and Reagan. Remember how much better off we became when we gave more to the wealthy?
Do you have any evidence that new products don't start expensive and become accessible when they mature?
> Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.
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 think a lot of people would welcome some disruption. This is why there has been a rise in populist parties which appeal because they promise something different.
I'm reminded of the somewhat derogatory term "carebear" from the EVE Online community, for players who focus on PvE and profit, while avoiding PvP.
> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats.
These boats may contain Tesla, Ramanujam, Röntgen and other talent people with poor circumstances.
Good social security is also investment in potential talent that could contribute to economy.
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.
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.
If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.
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.
My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.
At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.
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.
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?
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.)
>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.
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.
Urbanization is a problem and not enough people acknowledge it.
The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.
But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.
In China, Russia and America the government doesn't pay you generously in welfare to not contribute to society.
> We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours,
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.
The Americans are keeping the seas open for their own self-interest, and this is great. Other countries in the broader West do also chip in with their own military assets. Why should Maersk have a problem with this?
Americans seems to be intent to cause as much damage to everyone including themselves.
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.
> NATO and got military help out of it
That was token help (the Brits excluded), let's be serious here, we're all grown-up men.
It was not token help, that part is complete lie. It was real help and real European soldiers died. Including the ones from Denmark which was threatened by Trump. Or especially from Denmark, Denmark had the highest loss per capita within the coalition forces.
Lets be serious here.
Bad timing with that example - currently the US is the reason for an important part of the seas being closed :)
My biggest issue with Europe is not that we work less. I lived in the US for a while, and I can confirm they stay longer in the office but get the same amount done.
My biggest issue is that we have focused for too long on managing (regulating) and redistributing wealth instead of creating new sources of wealth.
We are obsessed with slicing and controlling the pie instead of creating new ones for everybody.
That mindset might cost us the future of our children.
Is there a point where enough (per capita) wealth has been created? Where there is enough pie to go around for everyone, and we have no need to create more pies?
I am sure we can all argue about where that point is, but I wonder if we agree that there is such a point? Or do we have to keep increasing our wealth forever?
The issue is that the world is changing and we have no means to stop that. If you don't create new pies, people come and eat your existing pies...
Look at the auto industry for example.
If Chinese decide to invest into EVs etc. we can't stand on the side lines and so, no we want the world / our wealth to stay like it is.
But that's how we operate. We operate as if we have decided it's enough, now everybody please stop.
It's not that Europeans embracing being idle. It's that they realized typical white collar workers hardly produce any value (unlike Americans who still pretend they do) so it makes no difference for them to work less than 40 hours per week.
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
Junior doctors slave away for senior doctors so that they can one day become senior doctors with 10x the pay and have junior doctors do most of their work. That’s not going to happen for the average white collar worker.
lol it's the same here in Canada, I'm guessing the US too is not too different
As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
There is also one big thing, Europe even though it tries with the EU, is still a group of countries, not a single country.
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.
> a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders
I am honestly curious who you are pointing at (in particular if you exclude British leaders)
Partly because I am actually curious, I don't doubt there are bad leaders.
But partly also because, without any details, this is a very general trope, that I don't really think is very healthy at the moment. Since it is food for right wing extremists (you probably know yourself where some politicians in USA originate from).
While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:
bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)
bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material
bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?
so there might be other factors.
There is also a general mindset of worklife balance and enjoyment from life.
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. ).
> Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally.
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.
I think it’s more that at a certain income, you kind of plateau. You can afford all the little pleasures you want, but you couldn’t meaningfully improve your life without doubling your income. It would not get you a nicer apartment, would not make a house more affordable, and would not give you more time to enjoy travelling.
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 am very happy with this
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.
It’s a mixed blessing. I am Canadian, and I prefer my quiet life and small flat to always being at work or mowing the lawn. I am always stunned to see how much people back home work. My friends in Germany have much more balanced lives.
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.
This is all about how the housing market is structured, not the amount worked. If people worked even more, house prices would rise further to cancel it.
The housing market is heavily location dependent, if you want to avoid rising prices you should just move out.
Is this actually a problem? We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office. The average - everywhere - is more like the equivalent of 20 hours of solid focused work per week day.
Does more white collar work beyond a threshold produce more value, anyway? Sometimes yes but often no.
> We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office.
Yes bc now this worker works same 3-4 hours but 4 days instead of 5.
From an employers perspective it would make sense to have people working five six hour days rather than four seven and a half hour days.
I saw this when I worked in Germany. They might not have worked as many hours but they worked hard during those hours.
UK workplaces where much more relaxed in comparison so even though people put in more hours the results were similar.
20 “usable” hours a week may be realistic, but 20 hours of work per weekday is startup class heh.
interesting. want to say most people i know, same countries, works more than 40 hrs a week. It really depends on your circles i guess, this perception.
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)
Your most important point:
> (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.
It's not strictly necessary to be a super power.
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.
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.
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.
It’s interesting that the countries with the weakest economies in Europe work the longest hours.
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'm guessing he means actual time physically working, not the theoretical time in the contract.
It really depends on your bubble but a lot of people have "full time" contracts (meaning 40-ish hours) but real hours vary. You can come later, leave earlier, go do something else in the day, and don't have to report it to anyone. Just make sure you're not missing a meeting and deliver what's needed on time. So in practice you end up working fewer hours on average, as long as you can produce enough on average (which honestly isn't hard in many large organisations, and hard to measure).
Boy does that resonate with my current feeling. I've spent the last maybe 18 months constantly working, paid, non-paid, voluntary work, side-projects, etc. I almost feel like I'm confusing myself with the amount of work/different projects I have. All while whenever I find an hour or two to just sit idle in the sun, I feel the very best, happy almost. No, I have nothing to show for this time, I can't go to bed with the feeling I've achieved something, I wasn't productive. But I feel.. good?
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!
Reminds me of the essay 'In Praise of Idleness' by Bertrand Russell <https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/>
I don't know... I know a few people who inherited enough money to be idle and they don't seem particularly happy with their idleness. Could of course be the social pressure we live in, and that could change if we're all idle.
It's conditioning. We cannot be happy idle because society deems idleness as bad. Just like people cannot be happy with a balding hairline because society has deemed it to be ugly. If the trend changes in a century and balding is suddenly hot then the same people would be happy.
It’s all about sex. Being idle typically means being poor. Try being in the dating market when you’re poor. Being bald means being middle aged which is also a big negative in the dating market.
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.
I have a few unemployed hipster friends who get laid a fair amount because their idleness enables them to go to hipster parties where they meet other idle hipsters to have sex with.
I'd argue that overall, having a job, unless it's a job that can easily get you laid (barman/barmaid, working in a shop, especially if you're a heterosexual male working in a clothes shop with an 80+% female clientele, music/artistic performance) is a net negative for your sex life. Working 60 hours/week in a tech company office, if you're a heterosexual male, is probably not as conductive to your sex life as being an unemployed bum who spends a couple of hours a day wandering the streets of a large city talking to strangers. Obviously, if you're a heterosexual female, being paid to be around a bunch of males in a tech office is probably going to massively help you get laid, but I think the key variable is just "number of potential partners encountered", not employment status.
Yeah poor people don't have sex. Neither do middle aged people. Lmao.
The ability to be at peace
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
What do you mean by societal hooks?
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.
As you mention Lafarge. I think his fallacy and other theorists of its time and school of thinking was mankinds natural sense of enough os enough.
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.
Please! "Machines of loving grace" comes from Richard Brautigan, not Dario Amodei!
https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...
We need more businesses run like the co-op models in some European countries where the workers own a large percentage of the business. Or those rare, profitable US companies that are privately held and offer significant ownership stake to their employees with upside (not fake startup options).
I don't expect to ever be in that position, but I couldn't imagine becoming a multimillionaire off the backs of my employees and to keep on stacking more money than I could ever spend just to feel like I'm still winning.
Point is, there's enough money being made to employ just about everyone and at fewer than 40 hours a week, but instead we have multi billionaires with more money than a dozen generations could spend.
This whole essay very strongly resonates with the anti-natalistic movement. The fact the protagonist of the story kills himself adds to this in a very unmistakable manner.
Idleness is something we crave when we lack it, but too much of it can also be its own kind of hell. For instance, post retirement depression.
In a similar vain, I currently enjoy reading A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros. Gros draws the musing of various philosophers on walking. To me, his description of the slow beat of the footstep that propels imagination resonates with how walking works for me. When I'm stuck on something and feel I need to keep pushing towards a solution, a short break, often the result of an obligatory walk/ride to the train station, already sets my mind in motion.
Crucial is that the walk is not an intentional break for the purpose of brainstorming, because then my thoughts stay stuck. Such walking is 'idle' in the sense that it is an almost automatic process. The whole point is that walking/idling should not be a productivity tool.
I was expecting the Dutch term niksen.
Earlier discussion of Lafarge's The Right to Be Lazy (217 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33901623
And Bertrand Russel's "In Praise of Idleness" (1932)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257677
It is very important to have the time and freedom to be idle.
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".
It is really thought provoking. Interesting how lafargue saw machines as a path to freedom, yet today we fear them for the opposite reason. Maybe the real issuen't AI replacing work, but our inability to redefine what "valuable time" looks like without it.
The issue is that he saw machines as working for the greater good of all, yet the reality we have are machines working for the benefit of a select few, who use that advantage to perpetuate the system where they are at the top and everyone is below. We have the technology to feed and clothe everyone and live comfortably, just not the collective will. Too many of us have been sold the fake idea that “everyone can make it” but individually. That you should be selfish and trample over others for your own personal success, instead of defining success as helping everyone do better.
This is so full of holes I don't even know where to start. But the main one is that you have a false dichotomy in assuming that individual success and "helping everyone do better" are mutually exclusive. For example, see the free market economy of the past 250 years.
> This is so full of holes I don't even know where to start.
I recommend you start by understanding the argument instead of straw manning it.
> But the main one is that you have a false dichotomy in assuming that individual success and "helping everyone do better" are mutually exclusive.
So your main objection against my point is an argument I haven’t made? There is a canyon of difference between “we have been sold idea X” and “idea Y and Z are incompatible”. Of course you can have individual success while helping everyone do better, because if you help everyone do better you also help yourself. That’s obvious, you are part of everyone.
> For example, see the free market economy of the past 250 years.
Yeah, that really helps everyone, that one there. No problems whatsoever that anyone can think of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Criticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like: Head-Trapped – Descartes, Dawkins, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, Darwin, And The Myth Of Western Civilisation.
> Marx, then, argued that the more we subordinate our creative needs to dead capital and its goals, the less we are. But this is also true when we subordinate our creative needs to revolutionary goals in the future. Why? Because the future is non-existential, it does not exist; it is as dead as capital.
https://www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkin...
The author's book, A short book about ego, is also very good.
wow, secular culture finally realizes that the sabbath is good
I feel like right now is the worst time to be idle. Stopping to smell the roses or lie on the grass when you could be spinning up agents and burning tokens means you'll be left in the dust.
Oh you will, will you? And what, pray tell, happens in this dust you’re left in? What’s the reward for working so hard right now? More work? What a rotten deal.
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.
Anybody can spin up agents and burn tokens. There is nothing special or particularly valuable about that.
Said the Hare to the Tortoise.
This was a great read. Thought-provoking.
I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this. This is extraordinarily written. It is etymologically out of the average. It’s complex. Concepts intertwine and build on each other. The linguistic choices are unusual but perfectly placed.
>>“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.
This easily could be AI generated, there is little character to it, and if you told me it was AI generated, I would believe you.
You clearly don’t understand shit about good writing.
In what possible sense is a hackneyed word like 'dovetailed' "perfect, yet statistically improbable"?
> 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.
If you’re picking apart sentences looking for signs of AI then you’re already rotted. Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.
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
We can't read everything, so we need markers of taste to figure out what is and isn't worth engaging with. AI tells are markers of drastically bad taste.
> Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.
Why are you telling other people what to talk or not to talk about?
Hrmph I say!
LLMs always could. They are simply just not asked (prompted) to speak in such a fashion, so they don’t.
IRC taught me to idle to power. Still doing so in 2026 ...
Otium refers to leisure, not laziness. And leisure in the classical sense is not idling, but rather activity that is not "servile", but rather free. So, for example, contemplation and the study of philosophy in pursuit of wisdom, with no immediate practical or instrumental aim, would be an example of leisure. Indeed, the opposite of otium is negotium, which is to say the negation of leisure. This supports the idea that classically, work was seen as subordinate to leisure and indeed something that was supposed to enable leisure. Today, we rather think of leisure as a recuperation from labor to which we must inevitably return. In Greek, we see something similar: schole meaning "leisure", and its negation ascholia meaning "busyness".
Josef Pieper wrote "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" [0], a book on this subject that people should read. John Paul II also wrote an encyclical, "Laborem Exercens" [1], that discusses, among other things, the purpose and nature of work and responds to both communist and capitalist views on the subject.
[0] https://ballyheaparish.com/resources/Leisure-The-Basis-of-Cu...
[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
problem with being idle is you end up with nothing to show for it
and the problem with always needing something to show is that you can never find peace...
Show whom?
What about a life well lived?
its a good idea in theory. But capitalists will make sure this does not happen because greed is never ending. today its AI, 10 years down the line it something else. Hence i think the right to be lazy is for a lucky few.
> Hence i think the right to be lazy is for a lucky few.
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.