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
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.
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
... See moreSamuel W. Franklin • The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
Five Ways to adjust your life to better survive these winter months.
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 more I heal, the less ambitious I become.
The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.
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
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
“The culture tells us two things can’t coexist. People say to me ‘I want to love my life but also pay my rent’ or ‘I want to be super mature but also child-like’, or ‘I want to travel but I’m also a homebody’ or ‘I want to be productive and also relaxed.’ Calm down... you can do both.” — Martha Beck