I love this “essay on idling,” by Mark Kingwell, in this weekend’s Globe and Mail.
For those who don’t know, Kingwell is Canada’s cool philosophy professor: media darling, sometime columnist (including a stint as the token progressive for the National Post), he writes for a popular audience on wide-ranging subjects (politics, happiness, architecture, booze), and is still a serious academic despite his good grooming habits and sociable personality. Kingwell is our BHL.
The column was written in support of a new book The Idler’s Glossary, which Kingwell contributed an introduction to. More here.
He comes out as a strong pro-idler — not as a joke, and not even tongue-in-cheek (though it is very light-hearted — how could you advocate idling and not be). He presents idling as a meaningful and positive activity, quite different from “slacking” or procrastinating. Slackers still define their slackerness in terms of work — it is not an absence of work-related concerns, but a reaction against them — so slackers are never really free from thinking about work:
In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.
Kingwell goes on to claim that in our society we have “annexed leisure… into a form of consumption.” We’re not really idle on weekends. Even when engaged in recreation, it’s a form of not-work, still beholden to the norms and demands of a work-oriented life.
But idling isn’t useless, and a world in which idling is as important as work is not necessarily a world falling apart. Kingwell resists setting up a program of how to live idly because you couldn’t possibly be successfully idle within any set program, it would defeat the purpose.
He doesn’t say it, but idleness is a practice (in the sense that Alisdair MacIntyre uses the word), having its own virtues, which can’t just be taught but must be gradually learned in the process of doing. I think many people resist idleness because they never give themselves an opportunity to become good at it: it’s always awkward because it’s unfamiliar. I learned because I need to be idle, I need at least an hour every day (it’s usually several hours) to drift.
Don’t be turned off by the connotations of “drifting.” In the process of drifting, we’re open to new discoveries and insights and associations of ideas: this is creativeness, this is the source of all great art and science. Discipline and work are also important for being creatively productive, but without a phase of generative idleness there would be nothing to produce – no plans, designs, ambitions or complex desires to act on.
Which isn’t to say that the virtue of idling is in its utility. Rather, idling is self-sufficiently useful, good for its own sake, an end-in-itself so to speak. Whereas work is not good for its own sake; work without any external purpose is a destructive element in society: it breeds boredom which can lead to vandalism and violence, and it prevents people from learning the virtues of idleness which would generate opportunities to grow and create positive value in the world.
If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need.
So start making plans to be idle sometime in 2009. If you’re not already an idler, you probably won’t know how to start right away. Instead, save your money (maybe this would have been better a couple of years ago…) and start getting mentally prepared to take a lot of time off to do something audaciously creative this summer. Maybe start thinking about writing an ambitious novel or a screenplay — as long as it’s so ambitious you’ll almost certainly fail and find yourself wandering around. If you start smelling success, try to make the project even more ambitious.
Maybe you never actually produce anything. That’s fine. In the process of failing you’ll find yourself learning and doing something unexpected, which is in some ways even better than what you aimed for. I’ve done this twice, and those were the two best decisions I’ve ever made, by far.
By coincidence, also this weekend Richard Florida pointed to a New York Times article on the radical career changes some former investment bankers etc are making:
“People feel there’s nothing to lose in terms of taking a risk and pursuing a new direction, especially when you have a résumé that says ‘banking’ and no banks are hiring,” Mr. Weiner said.
That was certainly the calculus for Benjamin Cox, 33. After leaving his job as a vice president at Goldman Sachs in August, he immediately began incubating his plans to work on his screenplay — he calls it a cross between “Swingers” and “Annie Hall” — and start a production company.
Mr. Cox said that with the upheaval on Wall Street, he feels relieved to have a backup plan. “I’m seeing a lot of people who never thought of an alternative to banking.”
Well, best of luck to Mr. Cox. Odds aren’t good that he’ll be a successful first-time screenwriter (see Malcolm Gladwell’s new, much discussed book, Outliers: The Story of Success), but at the very least he can learn a lot and maybe discover a new career — perhaps a better career than either banking or screenwriting — and a more meaningful life than he ever knew was possible.
We can’t find these without letting ourselves be idle. It’s best to do it when we’re young, but it’s never too late. So if you haven’t already, start now. Start by going for a walk.
