Idleism

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

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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?

Capitalism tells us this. Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey takes a deep dive into this link exploring how capitalism and white supremacy are at the heart of our inability to rest. These learnings have been crucial to my rest practices and are now weaved into my Yoga classes and wellbeing offerings because of it.

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

- Nikola Tesla

His biggest worry, though, is that we still mostly fail to acknowledge that we live in a roaring attention economy. In other words, we tend to ignore his favorite maxim, from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.” 

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

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“I felt like I was just a flightless bird that could only grip the railing and gaze into the distance,” he said.

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