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

"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

- Nikola Tesla

Trudeau Resignation, Live TV Merger, and Reminiscing Y2K

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.

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

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

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time by Nick Srnicek, Helen Hester is a intriguing and inspiring read that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt suffocated by the demands of domestic life, seeking a deeper understanding of the historical and philosophical roots of their struggles and a vision for a more liberated future.

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time by Nick Srnicek, Helen Hester

I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age

archive.ph

Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.

“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

Aggressively uncreative practices such as aimless wandering or birdwatching (or, as she perceptively calls it, “bird listening”) offer “an antidote to the rhetoric of growth” that surrounds us every day. There is ultimately a feminist and environmental case to be made for doing nothing: if we can shift our notion of constructive social behavior