Idleism

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.

“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.”

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

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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We can explore the ways in which our attention is generated, manipulated, valued and degraded. Sometimes attention might simply be a lens through which to read the events of the moment. But it can also force us toward a better understanding of how our minds work or how we value our time and the time of others. Perhaps, just by acknowledging its... See more

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

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

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?