Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.
We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Off...
What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old...
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety wi...
We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a b...
Their contemplation seems to reconnect us with a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the universe. They are literally other-worldly, and so remove us from the world and its cares; they lift...
It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.
Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane experiences which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That’s not really li...
Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We sho...
The tempo of modern life is such that we are giving less and less time and thought to the matter of cooking and feeding . . . it is a pretty crazy life when one eats to work and does not work in order...
The terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a mise...
[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the che...
The dogma of hard work—which is deeply embedded in contemporary notions of what it means to be American—is what keeps us toiling and keeps us happy to be exploited in this way.
It's easier to robe the poor.
Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
If we realized that meditation simply means staring into space, then it would be more accessible to more people. It’s easy. A window is all you need. I remember being at school and being able to spend...
If you’re not very careful, your creative business, the very thing which you hoped would lead to liberty and riches, will instead trap you in a hell of hard-working poverty.
It’s hard to drift off into nowhereland when your arousal hormones are circulating wildly as a result of your rage at mobile-phone users. Fantasies of hurling their mobile phones from the train window...
The idea of the job as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of...
Showing 21 to 40 of 113 results