Should we all be lazier?: Why everyday idleness could save the world

Everyone is overworked and underpaid, writes Matthew Neale, while our ‘free time’ is being eaten up by that nagging existential urge to be productive. What would happen if we all just stopped?

The 21st century human is pathologically obsessed with doing things at practically every hour of the day (iStock)

With the UK currently facing fresh waves of strike action across various sectors, it’s perhaps worth casting our minds back to some of the successes that industrial action has enjoyed over the years. In 1884, notably, an English trade unionist by the name of Tom Mann published a pamphlet offering a radical proposal: “Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of what we will.” Despite claims to the contrary from US country songwriters, the emergent nine-to-five template did appear to finally offer a balance of taking and giving. Why then, almost 140 years later, does it feel like we have so little time to ourselves?

The problem isn’t just that most of us are struggling to live on a standard salary, but that relentless labour is presented as a virtue in and of itself, regardless of its yield. In an interview with GQ earlier this month, Andrew Garfield spoke candidly about the incredibly hectic (not to mention award-winning) stretch of work he completed following the death of his mother in 2019 – only to still feel guilty when he finally took a break and saw other actors’ faces beaming down from Los Angeles billboards. “You start to go into, ‘Well, what am I doing? Why don’t I have a billboard?’” Garfield said. “It’s so stupid. It’s insane.” If Oscar-nominated Hollywood actors can’t shake the feeling that they’re not doing enough, there seems scant hope for the rest of us.

Sure enough, the rise in the number of people working second or third jobs, or even taking annual leave in order to get more work done, seems to suggest that something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong. Efforts to liberate employees from the shackles of the office job, including hybrid and flexible working, often make things worse by dissolving the boundaries between work and home – not just in terms of the physical spaces we inhabit, but the time that belongs to us; the “what we will” hours. If you’re never truly on the clock, you’re also never truly off it.

Jacqueline Carson is a psychotherapist and clinical hypnotherapist who frequently works with people suffering from stress, burnout, and associated long-term health issues. She also knows a thing or two about reaching your physical limits first-hand, having previously worked as a social worker in child protection for 25 years, where she reached management level. “The expectation is that you’re always there; it doesn’t matter what time of day, you’re on and available,” she says.

That stress eventually led to heavy drinking and smoking habits, she says, alongside the “fear in the pit of your stomach” any time the phone rang. “But you’re also afraid to miss a phone call. It came above and beyond everything else, including family. I’d reach for the glass of wine at the end of the night – but even then you’re still kind of switched on, still working and writing reports.”

In 2014, Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer. “That was the absolute wake-up call for me. I actually said to the consultants, ‘I haven’t got time for this. I haven’t got time for cancer.’” She gave up drinking and smoking and retrained in a new line of work. Now she sees a lot of the same problems in her clients, who simultaneously “don’t have time” for anything while feeling like they should be doing more. If it sounds all too familiar, you’re far from alone. “There’s that feeling of, ‘Whatever I do, I never feel any better. It’s never enough.’ I also see a lot of imposter syndrome – people who feel that everything they do just isn’t good enough.”

If someone urgently needs to speak to you, they’ll call you. Otherwise there’s nothing that can’t wait till the next morning

Jacqueline Carson

Unlike our pre-Industrial Revolution ancestors, the 21st-century human is pathologically obsessed with doing things at practically every hour of the day. We are taught from a young age to valorise hard work, particularly in working-class communities, as an unquestionable badge of honour, regardless of what the work produces or whom it serves. As we become ever more trapped in a perpetual cycle of labour and consumption, is it time to consider that idleness might be one of the last tiny rebellions we are afforded against capitalism? To put it another way: can we achieve praxis in laxness?

After all, the relentless pursuit of productivity and growth hasn’t just bled into our leisure time; it’s also become our leisure time. Even after the to-do list is defeated, productivity – the oughts of the world – remains at the forefront of our minds. Jenny Odell summarised this concept in her wonderful book How to Do Nothing, noticing how “every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living”, including the “numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram”. In this prison of our own making, where time is deemed far too valuable an asset to “waste” on pursuits that aren’t driving our value upwards by some tangible metric, to be idle is an intolerable insurrection.

What this is doing to our mental health is plain to see. Rates of depression and anxiety are on the rise across the UK, with the various physical tolls of stress piling additional misery onto an over-stimulated and underpaid population. The answers given are often unhelpful, usually vacillating between two different forms of privileged finger-wagging: either the commercialised, scented-candle brand of self-care that bypasses the larger cultural problem, or the girlbossification of unhealthy working patterns that does the same but with more to-do lists, highlighter pens and meal prep.

Carson says she encourages everyone to assert their boundaries: say no to working certain days or evenings; turn your phone off for a whole day at the weekend, or more frequently during the week. “If someone urgently needs to speak to you, they’ll call you,” she says. “Otherwise there’s nothing that can’t wait till the next morning.” It’s hard to disagree. These are the small changes we can make, alongside joining the bigger protests happening out on the streets right now.

The battle isn’t just a political one, then, at least in the sense of fixing the country’s wage stagnation and cost of living crisis – which is to say, our government’s refusal to tax the super-rich in order to fund an equitable society for the rest of us. It’s a battle for our sanity, the right to let our minds wander without being relentlessly pumped full of #content; the fight to prevent our discourse degrading into a steady stream of hot takes built on a decidedly lukewarm commitment to research and personal reflection. Quite simply, we cannot afford to waste so much of our time being busy, whether it’s answering emails, watching TV, yelling at each other on Twitter, or whatever it is that pays your bills.

We cannot afford to waste so much of our time being busy (iStock)

It’s a crisis that also requires us to move away from the fantasy of infinite growth in our own lives as well as that of our economies; to resist the idea that we must cultivate a “personal brand” around the clock to be both loved and paid in adequate measure. After all, as Odell points out, the purpose of our disengagement isn’t to step away from the world to selfish ends, but to allow ourselves the breathing space to step back into it, refreshed and ready to do the work that really matters.

“It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not,” she writes in that same book, “allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one”. If that new world is to be realised, we must first summon the courage to do absolutely nothing once in a while.