Words matter. These are the best Tom Hodgkinson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing.
Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg’s fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy.
I would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace.
We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment.
In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.
Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler’s break. Travel should not be hard work.
I’ve given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.
As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
Travelling fills me with dread.
Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite – dynamic, purposeful activity – is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.
If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That’s because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.
Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons.
Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.
What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest.
Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?
There’s nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.
Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn’t it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off?
The phrase ‘work/life balance’ encapsulates a depressing outlook.
The world’s richest half billion people – that’s about seven per cent of the global population – are responsible for fifty per cent of the world’s emissions.
In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.
The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free.
We no longer sing and dance. We don’t know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.
On bikeback, there is a delightful sense of self-direction and autonomy. Lately, I have taken to cycling slowly, more fun than the fast, competitive commuter cycling I used to do. No longer do I jump lights or attempt that irritating wobbling thing that semi-professional cyclists like to indulge in.
Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.
Computers tend to separate us from each other – Mum’s on the laptop, Dad’s on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.
I’ve often said that far more sensible than a ‘make poverty history’ campaign would be a ‘make wealth history’ campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.
All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.
Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers’ happiness – or what management types refer to as ’employee satisfaction results’ – might improve.
Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?
Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word ‘passionate’ in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.
Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather.
The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won’t give you what you need.
Alongside my ‘no email’ policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
You can become very serious as a parent. That’s got to be fought against.
Whether you live in the city or in the country, creating time for a leisurely ramble is an easy thing to do.
Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing.
When we are busy at work and busy at home, an hour’s walking every day becomes a real luxury. If done alone, the walk injects a period of meditation into the day, and if done in company, it allows space for some really good conversation.
