Tedium - Slackers vs. Strivers 📖

Today in Tedium: Eighty-four years ago, two men set out competing visions of life in the twentieth century: get out and do things, or embrace the noble art of leaving things undone. One would become part of the cultural bedrock of America. The other was relegated to curio status, a dusty trinket rattling around in the drawer of humanity. Today’s Tedium pulls the lid back on an uncanny historical coincidence, the eternal battle between strivers and idlers—and a forgotten invitation to do less, and do it well. — Fahad @ Tedium

The polymath Lin Yutang. “It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make our life endurable.” (Carl Van Vechten/via U.S. Library of Congress)

An older conception of leisure

Lin forces us to confront some hard questions: why do we work? Are our jobs intrinsically rewarding, or do we use the paycheck to pursue intrinsically rewarding things? And what does it mean to live well? He is not the first to argue that we have lost some guiding value, and that our current trajectory is unsustainable. That cause has been taken up countless times, including by philosopher-historian duo Robert and Edward Skidelsky in How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life.

They argue that endless economic growth is not only unwise, but self-defeating. Public discussion of any idea of ‘enoughness’—the good life—is completely absent, and they say this is to blame for our interminable addiction to consumption and work. For Virginia Woolf, having enough meant £500 a year and a ‘room of one’s own’. Now, that same threshold depends largely on what you see on your Facebook feed. Keeping up with the Joneses has never been so relentless.

The Skidelskys put forward seven basic goods that tend to constitute a good life, among them health, security, harmony with nature, and leisure. We should aim to reduce toil and increase leisure, they say, as that word used to be understood:

In contemporary parlance, leisure is synonymous with relaxation and rest. But there is another, older conception of leisure, according to which it is not just time off work but a special form of activity in its own right. Leisure in this sense is that which we do for its own sake, not as a means to something else.

Leisure need not mean three-hour lunches and mojitos by the pool. It might instead mean taking up bike repair, writing a novel, learning to dance, helping in your dad’s company, or volunteering at a shelter. It might mean starting the business you’ve always dreamed of. But it might also mean nothing more ambitious than taking care of your kids and tending the garden—perfectly satisfactory goals that have somehow morphed into a red flag that you’ve thrown in the towel.

Why is leisure a basic good? The reason is clear, they say: “a life without leisure, where everything is done for the sake of something else, is vain indeed. It is a life spent always in preparation, never in actual living.” You could have lifted that sentence out of Lin’s seventh chapter, The Importance of Loafing. “Time is useful because it is not being used,” he muses. “Leisure is like unoccupied floor space in a room… it is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make our life endurable.”

A modern edition of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” the granddaddy of self-help books. (Alan O’Rourke/Flickr)

The battle between strivers and idlers

The tussle between Lin and Carnegie was just one battle in an eternal war, for strivers and idlers have always had a fractious relationship. One side believes, like Dr Johnson, that by being satisfied with little, the idler not only escapes “fruitless” labours, but sometimes “succeeds better than those who think every thing more valuable as it is harder to be acquired.” On the other side, figures like eighteenth-century Methodist John Wesley preached the virtue of early rising with misplaced scientific confidence: “By soaking so long between warm sheets, the flesh is as it were parboiled, and becomes soft and flabby.” Clearly, this fleshly cooking did wonders for Dr Johnson, who used to lie in bed until the early afternoon and still found time to produce the first English dictionary, alongside a literary career that would embarrass most writers today.

But work needed its advocates. How could the industrial revolution be carried out without minions? After Wesley, the nineteenth-century thinker Thomas Carlyle took up the Methodist mantle to promote the dignity of toil. “Man was created to work,” he blasted, “not to speculate, or feel, or dream. Every idle moment is treason.” Some have pointed out the convenience of the narrative to the rich, who were often happy, as Bertrand Russell put it, “to preach the dignity of labour while taking care themselves to remain undignified.”

Loafers didn’t take this lying down—or at least, they didn’t let that stop them. Victorian writer Jerome K. Jerome took the idler banner into the twentieth century. He complained of symptoms of an illness, primarily “a general disinclination to work of any kind.” But science hadn’t caught up to the problem, he said, and uncharitable neighbors put it down to laziness. “‘Why, you skulking little devil, you,’ they would say, ‘get up and do something for your living, can’t you?’—not knowing, of course, that I was ill.” Thus the creative art of the serial skiver was born.

But a watershed moment was on the horizon for the cause of hard graft: the Great Depression. It was the first time that labor was marketed as self-help, at the same time that the individual was conceived of as another product in the market. Sociologist Sue Currell has commented that self-help literature of the 1930s showed “an intensified demand for more efficient use of energies and skills, arguing that ‘recovery’ was only possible by improving personal efficiency and streamlining oneself for new market conditions.” Currell points to the self-help guru Walter Pitkin as a prime example of this, a man who commanded Americans to recast themselves as a “business proposition”: “You should begin by analyzing yourself as a human product in the market for a buyer ready to pay a right price for the proper commodity ... Do try to sell yourselves as a better product.” Though the language sounds rather crude to a modern ear, couched in more acceptable language, this formula for self-help still persists.

And today, the entrenchment of the Protestant work ethic is deeper than ever. There is an unwritten assumption that one must always aspire to higher office, a higher salary, and more of everything. Dropping lucrative work for more leisure time invites quizzical looks wherever you go, despite the fact that nearly half of all workers don’t like their jobs. In an age of ambitious go-getting, prestige, self-presentation, and just plain being the best, it feels like Carnegie’s book is the choreography to which we’re all unconsciously shuffling.