I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob.
(Honest disclaimer: I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble, no idea about blue collar to be honest. Not much contact with people from that field unfortunately)
So we surely made progress here in the direction of being more idle (though one could question wether you are truly “idle” if you fill your free time with staring at your phones screen, consuming the latest societal rage bait. But i’d say in the spirit of the essay, yes, we are much more idle thanks to tech).
BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While we Europeans are super idle, Chinese arose to be a super power. The US dominates tech and the future technologies. Russia is banging on our front door and we dont have the military means and will to put an end to it. So while idle ness is a great mode for Being, is it a great mode for making sure the own civilization survives?
Thats always my problem with those ideas. They sound super nice in theory, but in the harsh world, there will always be a predator who just works a little bit hardwr to get you …
anyway! loved the essay. thanks for sharing
zemvpferreira 45 minutes ago [-]
European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not the issue.
HPsquared 14 minutes ago [-]
I'm reminded of the somewhat derogatory term "carebear" from the EVE Online community, for players who focus on PvE and profit, while avoiding PvP.
joe_mamba 23 minutes ago [-]
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.
I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
zozbot234 50 seconds ago [-]
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?
If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote.
raincole 15 minutes ago [-]
It's not that Europeans embracing being idle. It's that they realized typical white collar workers hardly produce any value (unlike Americans who still pretend they do) so it makes no difference for them to work less than 40 hours per week.
Junior doctors across Europe reported working an average of 57 ± 17 hours per week (216 ± 61 hours per month)[0].
> Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally.
In DE I would argue that this is due to punitive taxes and I wouldn't call it progress.
Poor people work their asses 40+ hours and up to overwork since it's always paid here. White collars work less time and often switch to 4 days because at this tax progression working your ass is not worth it. Time is more valuable, indifference curve is screwed.
It also have negative effect on women's careers in combo with 3/5 tax classes thing.
And it hurts EU economies very hard since the most productive ones are disincentivized to work more.
saidnooneever 15 minutes ago [-]
interesting. want to say most people i know, same countries, works more than 40 hrs a week. It really depends on your circles i guess, this perception.
I do see more people with higher wages chose more for time off than more money, and work 4 days for example..But the majority of the population does not fit that category i think. (i dont have the exact numbers, but most jobs are not high income in general)
zozbot234 38 minutes ago [-]
> Russia is banging on our front door and we dont have the military means and will to put an end to it.
Luckily for us, modern warfare seems to heavily favor the defender as proven lately by Russia and others - and this creates a meaningful incentive against military attack. To be clear, I'm not saying that it's painless - on the contrary, attrition is very high once actual hostilities are ongoing. But it should at least be rare.
nekitamo 42 minutes ago [-]
As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
joe_mamba 39 minutes ago [-]
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.
You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
namanyayg 5 hours ago [-]
It feels like there is no correct translation for it in English -- idleness carries connotations of laziness whereas a better way to think about it is being aware and present of the moment.
I have been practicing Buddhism for a while and it often is indescribably blissful to just sit in nature, feeling the wind in my hair and sun on my back.
Anyone can experience this door with just a little bit of practice and I encourage everyone to try.
strken 3 hours ago [-]
I have never practiced Buddhism and it is still indescribably blissful to sit in a clearing in a forest, provided you aren't sitting on the wrong kind of anthill.
rewgs 2 hours ago [-]
Is there a right kind of anthill to sit on?
strken 2 hours ago [-]
In my area, the wrong kind of anthill contains anything in the genus Myrmecia, and the right kind contains almost anything else.
smackeyacky 2 hours ago [-]
If you’re an ant, sure!
RickHull 3 hours ago [-]
The jargon term, slack, comes to mind, in the concept-cluster of the old Google 20%-time, Slackware Linux, and Church of the SubGenius.
mesrik 42 minutes ago [-]
and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!
My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.
ghaff 3 hours ago [-]
In general use though slack has an even stronger connotation of e.g. slacking off and not doing anything useful with the time.
bigiain 40 minutes ago [-]
Alternatively, ensuring you have enough slack in the schedule is, at least for some tech leads and project managers, an essential tool to enable meeting deadlines.
(So, I suppose using "slack" in a positive sense by project management, while probably still being considered a pejorative thing by non technical management or beancounters...)
nickvec 25 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. Meditation and mindfulness have confirmed the importance of “being idle,” at least for me. Making an active effort to not be distracted by thought is quite the challenge, but it has brought me great peace.
zozbot234 1 hours ago [-]
You're a lot more likely to be aware in the present moment when you're deep in a 'flow' state doing something productive than when you're just sitting around doing nothing. Why do people assume that idleness is something to aim for, and enjoying real productive work is not?
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1 hours ago [-]
Why do people(you, in this case, but this is a very common fallacy) assume that advocating for one thing(idleness) is implicitly advocating against its opposite(work)? We can do both, just not simultaneously.
zozbot234 52 minutes ago [-]
Because the article's title is "The Importance of Being Idle" not The Importance of doing something that you enjoy"? It's all-too-easy to enjoy being idle, but ultimately it's also a bit mindless, and this deprives us of deeper forms of enjoyment and engagement.
pandatigox 3 hours ago [-]
I think I would say a better variant would be "the importance of being still"
10729287 2 hours ago [-]
As a french I like the term "idle", as the state my computer switch to when i'm not asking it anything.
dripdry45 5 hours ago [-]
I started with “How to Be Idle” by Hodgkinson about 20 years ago. Found “The importance of living “ by Lin yutang.
I now have a small collection of books about idleness… yet here i am working and then throwing myself into working on a century house in my spare time… feeling starved for idleness. Yet my most creative ideas for it come when I’m idle.
Idleness led to Taoism, the pursuit of being useless. Led to Buddhism: just sit.
As the quote sort of goes: The great preponderance of society’s problems come from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room by themselves.
It’s a noble pursuit, idleness. Really. If you haven’t tried it, give it a real shake. A little more might fall out than you expect.
sph 2 hours ago [-]
These essays on idleness, along with the more radical ones against work in general (love Bob Black’s take on it), have been great comfort to my tired soul.
I will once again recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, especially The Burnout Society.
The older I get, the more pointless I find the modern goal of productivity. If there is one asymptotic goal one should rather pursue, is to do the most with the least bit of effort. And it all circles back to the teachings of the Tao. Be like water, not like the machine.
syphia 1 hours ago [-]
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Blaise Pascal
Translations vary slightly.
Animats 58 minutes ago [-]
Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem.
There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before.
It didn't help.
lmf4lol 30 minutes ago [-]
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's *inability* to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
Smart phones etc just prove that we can't sit quietly in a room alone.
sunny678 8 minutes ago [-]
It is really thought provoking. Interesting how lafargue saw machines as a path to freedom, yet today we fear them for the opposite reason. Maybe the real issuen't AI replacing work, but our inability to redefine what "valuable time" looks like without it.
I don't know... I know a few people who inherited enough money to be idle and they don't seem particularly happy with their idleness. Could of course be the social pressure we live in, and that could change if we're all idle.
hackable_sand 3 hours ago [-]
The ability to be at peace
Everyone struggles with it. Would be nice to have some societal hooks so that more people could be confidently serene
And then go about their day
silversmith 2 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by societal hooks?
The ability to be at peace, in my world view, stems first and foremost from the ability to be at peace with yourself. Being able to look in a mental mirror, and accepting the image staring back as yourself, warts and all. It's not exactly liking every last imperfection, rather not feeling guilty for not measuring up in all aspects to the ideals of a society or dreams of your younger self. Accepting that you are not the universal paragon and probably never will be, all the while not giving up on the idea of improving yourself.
Only when one can be locked in a room with oneself for a measure of time and not get in a fight, can we talk about being at peace with society and other external factors.
tock 2 hours ago [-]
It's conditioning. We cannot be happy idle because society deems idleness as bad. Just like people cannot be happy with a balding hairline because society has deemed it to be ugly. If the trend changes in a century and balding is suddenly hot then the same people would be happy.
mitchbob 10 hours ago [-]
Earlier discussion of Lafarge's The Right to Be Lazy (217 comments):
I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this.
This is extraordinarily written. It is etymologically out of the average.
It’s complex. Concepts intertwine and build on each other.
The linguistic choices are unusual but perfectly placed.
>>“But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Paul Lafargue and his wife committed suicide—he was 69; she was 66. His reason, it seems to me, dovetailed with his philosophy”.
“Dovetailed”.
Call me when an LLM will ever be able to pick and use such a perfect, yet statistically improbable, word
to construct such a sentence.
squidbeak 15 minutes ago [-]
In what possible sense is a hackneyed word like 'dovetailed' "perfect, yet statistically improbable"?
> I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this.
Never is a long, long while for LLM development to catch up with hack journalism.
justonceokay 2 hours ago [-]
If you’re picking apart sentences looking for signs of AI then you’re already rotted. Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.
Determining if something’s AI generated just gives us another reason not to engage. Like solving a puzzle on the kids menu instead of eating the food on the plate
missingdays 2 hours ago [-]
> Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.
Why are you telling other people what to talk or not to talk about?
ejoso 2 hours ago [-]
Hrmph I say!
4 hours ago [-]
shevy-java 47 minutes ago [-]
IRC taught me to idle to power. Still doing so in 2026 ...
addybojangles 2 hours ago [-]
This was a great read. Thought-provoking.
suradethchaipin 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
supliminal 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ibeckermayer 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pestatije 3 hours ago [-]
problem with being idle is you end up with nothing to show for it
placebo 3 hours ago [-]
and the problem with always needing something to show is that you can never find peace...
hliyan 2 hours ago [-]
Show whom?
Rendered at 08:06:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So we surely made progress here in the direction of being more idle (though one could question wether you are truly “idle” if you fill your free time with staring at your phones screen, consuming the latest societal rage bait. But i’d say in the spirit of the essay, yes, we are much more idle thanks to tech).
BUT! Is this a survival strategy? While we Europeans are super idle, Chinese arose to be a super power. The US dominates tech and the future technologies. Russia is banging on our front door and we dont have the military means and will to put an end to it. So while idle ness is a great mode for Being, is it a great mode for making sure the own civilization survives?
Thats always my problem with those ideas. They sound super nice in theory, but in the harsh world, there will always be a predator who just works a little bit hardwr to get you …
anyway! loved the essay. thanks for sharing
I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote.
Junior doctors across Europe reported working an average of 57 ± 17 hours per week (216 ± 61 hours per month)[0].
[0]: https://www.juniordoctors.eu/assets/rest-report-DeLrwvob.pdf
In DE I would argue that this is due to punitive taxes and I wouldn't call it progress.
Poor people work their asses 40+ hours and up to overwork since it's always paid here. White collars work less time and often switch to 4 days because at this tax progression working your ass is not worth it. Time is more valuable, indifference curve is screwed.
It also have negative effect on women's careers in combo with 3/5 tax classes thing. And it hurts EU economies very hard since the most productive ones are disincentivized to work more.
I do see more people with higher wages chose more for time off than more money, and work 4 days for example..But the majority of the population does not fit that category i think. (i dont have the exact numbers, but most jobs are not high income in general)
Luckily for us, modern warfare seems to heavily favor the defender as proven lately by Russia and others - and this creates a meaningful incentive against military attack. To be clear, I'm not saying that it's painless - on the contrary, attrition is very high once actual hostilities are ongoing. But it should at least be rare.
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
I have been practicing Buddhism for a while and it often is indescribably blissful to just sit in nature, feeling the wind in my hair and sun on my back.
Anyone can experience this door with just a little bit of practice and I encourage everyone to try.
My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.
(So, I suppose using "slack" in a positive sense by project management, while probably still being considered a pejorative thing by non technical management or beancounters...)
Idleness led to Taoism, the pursuit of being useless. Led to Buddhism: just sit.
As the quote sort of goes: The great preponderance of society’s problems come from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room by themselves.
It’s a noble pursuit, idleness. Really. If you haven’t tried it, give it a real shake. A little more might fall out than you expect.
I will once again recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, especially The Burnout Society.
The older I get, the more pointless I find the modern goal of productivity. If there is one asymptotic goal one should rather pursue, is to do the most with the least bit of effort. And it all circles back to the teachings of the Tao. Be like water, not like the machine.
Translations vary slightly.
It didn't help.
Smart phones etc just prove that we can't sit quietly in a room alone.
Everyone struggles with it. Would be nice to have some societal hooks so that more people could be confidently serene
And then go about their day
The ability to be at peace, in my world view, stems first and foremost from the ability to be at peace with yourself. Being able to look in a mental mirror, and accepting the image staring back as yourself, warts and all. It's not exactly liking every last imperfection, rather not feeling guilty for not measuring up in all aspects to the ideals of a society or dreams of your younger self. Accepting that you are not the universal paragon and probably never will be, all the while not giving up on the idea of improving yourself.
Only when one can be locked in a room with oneself for a measure of time and not get in a fight, can we talk about being at peace with society and other external factors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33901623
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257677
>>“But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Paul Lafargue and his wife committed suicide—he was 69; she was 66. His reason, it seems to me, dovetailed with his philosophy”.
“Dovetailed”. Call me when an LLM will ever be able to pick and use such a perfect, yet statistically improbable, word to construct such a sentence.
> I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this.
Never is a long, long while for LLM development to catch up with hack journalism.
Determining if something’s AI generated just gives us another reason not to engage. Like solving a puzzle on the kids menu instead of eating the food on the plate
Why are you telling other people what to talk or not to talk about?