American idle

A literary guide to the slack-off life

By David Moisl

Americans today have longer work weeks and less vacation time than people in any other industrialized country. Number one again! Paradoxically, the result of all this hard work is not the prosperity and leisure we've been promised but rather, as Tom Hodgkinson, author of How to Be Idle, puts it, increased anxiety and ill health.

"A recent UN report stated that work kills two million people per year," Hodgkinson writes. "That's an amount equivalent to two September 11 disasters every day. Yet I see no 'War on Work' being declared by governments around the world."

Your bosses want to keep you running the hamster wheel and producing endlessly, so they try to convince you that idle hands are the devil's tools, as the proverb goes. But as the authors of Time Off! The Unemployed Guide to San Francisco point out, "Ironically, too much time 'producing' means not enough time to explore, create or invent." It must have been by gross oversight that idleness was not included in the Declaration of Independence next to the American ideals of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Say no to jobs!

While How to Be Idle addresses the "conflicting emotions of pleasure and guilt" surrounding an idler's life, it fails to address the financial front. From a book that includes the words "how to" in the title, one would expect not just actual tips on how to get more lazy but also sufficient financial advice that enables one better to live that lifestyle. Granted, idleness is a state of mind, but without money it's hard to reach that state. Time Off! acknowledges that stuff like this is important and encourages you to live a minimalist lifestyle or at least become more moderate: brewing your own coffee instead of going to the coffee shop, borrowing books from the library, "gym slutting" (going from one free trial membership to another), and generally adopting more frugal habits. Bonjour Laziness has a slightly different take on indolence. While it definitely promotes a slacker philosophy, the author, Corinne Maier, concedes that most people simply have to work, so she takes a "slack off at work" approach.

Maier thinks the first realization people need to have is that work is solely a place to make money and not an environment for self-fulfillment. Business promises that it can unlock people's true potential and liberate us, but that sounds eerily close to the Auschwitz inscription Arbeit macht frei: Work will set you free. To Maier this so-called freedom is akin to what "pornography is to sexual liberation: a poor substitute." Once you understand that, her book "will help you take advantage of the firm you work for, which up until now has been taking advantage of you. It will explain why it's in your best interest to work as little as possible, and how to undermine the system from within, without appearing to do so."

A runaway best seller in France (270,000 copies sold), Bonjour Laziness is basically a pamphlet (presumably written during work hours) on doing as little as possible Ñ and getting away with it. Maier, a hopelessly overqualified woman who studied economics and politics with additional education in psychoanalysis, works in a mediocre job at the French energy corporation ƒlectricitŽ de France. Presumably, the company now regrets having employed such an intelligent woman with a talent for comedy and subversion. In fact, since her self-help-book-with-a-twist (it's antimotivational) undermines the work ethic and morality, EDF initially sought to punish Maier. However, after increased media attention on the conflict, which in turn raised sales, the company refrained from pursuing any disciplinary action.

Taking issue with ridiculous company "philosophies," Maier calls for "active disengagement" from the giant sham that is the world of business. By forcing people to dress like puppets all week and speak in gibberish office talk, the corporate world is dehumanizing, she argues, reducing employees to pieces of machinery.

"Your perceptions, your feelings, your ambition, must be translatable into spreadsheets and graphs," she writes.

Although Maier makes her case with wit and style (including chapter titles such as "The Idiots You Rub Shoulders With" and "Corporate Culture: Culture, My Ass!"), at times the book reads like a long train of thought or a rant. Generally, she advises the children of the middle class to bail out by heading into the arts, sciences, or teaching, "or by withdrawing partially from the corporate world, middle finger elegantly raised as a parting gesture."

Time Off! The Unemployed Guide to San Francisco starts by challenging the assumption that your job is your identity and sees unemployment as a chance to get "reacquainted with your non-work self." This slacker's manifesto from and about the City That Knows How aims to redefine and celebrate joblessness and "hails the benefits of working less and playing more." Not only do the authors, Dean LaTourette and Kristine Enea, tell you what to do with your time when you've been handed the pink slip, but they also actively advocate becoming unemployed and rediscovering your city. After all, "San Francisco offers so much to explore at such little cost." Appropriately, the mascot of the book is the seal, the San Francisco icon usually found dozing in the sun.

The book gives you plenty of tips on how to spend your newfound free time without spending too much cash, initially concentrating on how to keep busy during the hours from nine to five. From free walking tours, free days in museums, and street fairs to half-price theater tickets, Time Off! encourages all locals to become tourists. In fact, the authors believe unemployment can help you open your mind, as expanding your horizons is a big part of the practice of leisure: "A horse with blinders only sees the racetrack; an over-employed San Franciscan only sees the job. Downtime rips those blinders off, leaving us open to new encounters." The book is not always seamlessly guidebook and unemployment advisor at the same time, however. In a section on international travel, for example, it completely ceases to be a San Francisco guide.

In characteristic socially minded San Francisco fashion, Time Off! encourages you to "share the leisure" and volunteer. Not only is this a good way to give something back to the community, but according to the authors, it can be a good way to network and (yikes!) find a job again. That's right; the last two chapters of the book are actually devoted to getting back into the working world. Time Off! takes a different approach to that of Bonjour Laziness: If you find something you like, say the authors, it won't feel like work all that much. But don't worry; with their concept of "leisurely work," they still recommend taking breaks and (covert) naps, playing hooky, and generally keeping the slacker spirit that, with luck, you discovered during your unemployment stint. And if working just sounds too frightening, you could always go back to school, since "academia can make a superb cocoon for the leisure connoisseur."

One such true, self-proclaimed connoisseur is Hodgkinson, who has been editing his antiwork magazine, The Idler, in England since 1993. While his critics will surely call him immature for encouraging being lazy and getting wasted, to his credit he backs up his philosophy with bits of wisdom from great thinkers, poets, and idlers through the ages; these eminences include Oscar "doing nothing is hard work" Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, and Marcel Proust.

Spiced up with Hodgkinson's British brand of humor and quirkiness, the book's core argument is that idleness is really our natural state. Hodgkinson promotes sleeping in, skiving ("the skiver is stealing back time that has been stolen from him"), getting drunk at lunch, embracing hangovers, slow eating, dozing, fishing ("a superb way of doing nothing [that] legitimizes idleness"), smoking, drinking beer, stargazing, imaginary space-travel, daydreaming, rioting ("paradoxically, idlers are given to riot ... he would rather not riot, but when his right to be lazy is attacked, he may be roused to activity"), and meditating ("where doing absolutely nothing for hours on end is elevated to the level of a spiritual quest").

To Hodgkinson the true idler is nothing more and nothing less than a "student of the art of living." How to Be Idle is the most political of the three books. Whereas Time Off! manages to hide politics behind a facade of being just a fun city guide, Hodgkinson is an anarchist at heart who proposes disobeying all rules and taking control of your own life.

Workers of the world: Quit!

Maier hopes to show you that "if you have nothing to gain by working hard, you don't have much to lose in doing nothing." And the true idler, according to Hodgkinson, "believes that the deferral of pleasure in service of an imaginary future of stability is a bourgeois myth." Whoever thinks, "I really miss work" when watching a beautiful sunset while enjoying some time off simply must be criminally insane. Hodgkinson puts his main argument for withdrawing from the rat race succinctly: "The difficulty is that we get ourselves caught in a double bind: we work so hard that we do not allow ourselves time to dream, and therefore we continue to work hard because we have not had the time to dream up an alternative." So get to it. Stop working, and start living, or, in the words of French philosopher Guy Debord: "Free the Passions! Never Work! Live without Dead Time!"<\!s>v

How to be Idle
By Tom Hodgkinson. Harper Collins, 286 pages, $18.95.
Bonjour Laziness: Jumping off the Corporate Ladder
By Corinne Maier, Pantheon, 137 pages, $16.95.
Time Off! The Unemployed Guide to San Francisco
By Dean LaTourette and Kristine Enea. Leisure Team Productions, 395 pages, $19.95 (paper).