Idleism

Not to be confused with “idealism.” Not everything needs to be productive. Life happens in the idle margins, margins that are shrinking by the day.

David Pennington

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

The God you find in the pub

A High-Level Introduction to Idleism

Not to be confused with idealism. Although, I wouldn’t mind making the argument that idle is the ideal. Some principles of Idleism, in no particular order:

You are more than an hourly rate.
- You will never get paid “what you are worth” by an employer. The entire precept of capitalism is that they make more from your

Or what about a calendar that was simply, as one reader imagined, oriented around protecting time, instead of filling it? What would an un-calendar be?

Anne Helen Petersen • The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture

“Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”

L. M. Sacasas • (100) Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It

Dogs have nowhere to be, but they

always seem to be down to go

just about anywhere.

Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life

porchlightbooks.com

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

Today you rarely see the word “idle” except when used as a pejorative; to be idle is to be wasteful, and several of the most popular Internet startup companies have targeted underutilized resources such as idle cars (Turo, ZipCar), household equipment (SnapGoods), or empty bedrooms (Airbnb), allowing people to make use of them by renting them out... See more

Christine Rosen • On The Death of Daydreaming