99+ Tom Hodgkinson Quotes on The Freedom Manifesto, How to Be Idle and Conscience - Quotes.pub

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Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don’t work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it’s easier to start doing what you want to do.

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We’re reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside.

In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.

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.

What I’ve found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what’s going on in your own community.

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.

I think it’s good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?

It’s senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .

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?

I’ve never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don’t understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: ‘What do you do?’ is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality.

I don’t put much faith in the political system because it’s a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.

My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.

Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they’re over-worked.

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you’ve finished it, you’ve done it, and there’s the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It’s absolutely ideal for an idler.

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.

It’s easier to robe the poor.

Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.

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.

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?

Life is about recapturing lost freedoms...

Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child’s first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don’t need in order to dull the pain of overwork?

Travelling fills me with dread.

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. You would have thought that the end of all this innovation, technological advancement, and financial wizardry should be to create less work, not more of it.

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there’s no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they’re asking questions.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we’ll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves.

When people say ” I just don’t have enough time ” they mean ” I prioritized something else.

I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.

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.

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.

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.

In a world where you are constantly asked to be ‘committed,’ it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.

Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion.

I suddenly realised, hey, I’m not a lazy idiot, I’m an idler! It’s something to aspire to, it’s part of the creative process! That’s fantastic!

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.

Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience.

Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: “Time is money.” He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn’t money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.

Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.

We have an idea that if something we’re doing isn’t actually earning money, or spending it, then it’s completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.

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.

To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

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 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.

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.

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.

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