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.
Idleism
only when we have shifted into the rest-and-digest response of the nervous system will our brains allow us to reclaim our attention, access the power of our imagination, and unlock our subconscious.
James Doty • Mind Magic
Emil Cioran never had a real job. ‘I avoided at any price the humiliation of a career,’ he observed toward the end of his life. ‘I preferred to live like a parasite [rather] than to destroy myself by keeping a job.’
Costica Bradatan • Learning to Be a Loser: A Philosopher’s Case for Doing Nothing
Even if you don’t plan a whole trip around them, libraries are excellent spots for weary travelers: free, quiet, cool, full of locals, and staffed by people whose job is to help any visitors who walk in the door.
Austin Kleon • Library Tourism - Austin Kleon
Once we were camping outside of Savannah, GA, in the middle of December. The weather was mild, but gloomy. We spent the better part of a day in the downtown library - wifi, quiet, just getting out of the campsite for a bit. Free, which was nice. A good break from our usual bar-hopping tourism.
It’s ok to wait, and it’s definitely ok to de-wheel from the hamsterism of today’s productivity theatre. In fact, you might need to if you really want to dream up a monster story.
Kristin Posehn • Mary Shelley (and a bit of Steve Jobs)—On the Art of Creative Waiting
The pleasure of this depraved human state lies, I think, in the contradiction: Resting in the literal physical sense, persisting in the toxic spiritual one. It’s a state that suggests a low tolerance for understimulation, a common modern condition.
Haley Nahman • #208: What is rotting, if not rest?
Does the act of sitting in a park, patiently looking through a pair of binoculars and reading through field guides really deserve to be described with the same adjective usually reserved for angsty hardcore punk music, crusty anarchos and angry outcasts with ripped leather jackets?
If one considers punk as anything defiantly anti-capitalist,... See more
If one considers punk as anything defiantly anti-capitalist,... See more
Alexi Gunner • idle gaze 067: slowpunk
“Slowpunk”
“The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. “It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.” The business model of platforms like this — which rely on advertising and clicks and “engagement”
... See moreJenny Odell • How to quit Facebook without quitting Facebook
“People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.”
Simon Sarris • Careful Technology
He took up this path not out of some particularly lazy disposition, but because of his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding. ‘[T]o do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual,’ Oscar Wilde observed decades before Cioran.