A blog about not getting things done
Jun 29th, 2008 by francis
“We need to find the time to daydream and be bored, and to see that, too, as a part of our creativity. We need, as it were, to find the time to waste time without worrying about the consequences”.
Psychologist and author, Adam Phillips, when asked by writer Sean O’Hagan to name one single thing that might make us more content. Found via the charming Caught By The River.
May 30th, 2008 by francis
This seems like very Slow travel to me…
Three men travel the width of England in an electric milkfloat - it travels at a maximum speed of 15 miles an hour, and needs an 8 hour recharge after every 30 miles travelled.
I do love books that look at the world from a slower pace, a different route. They say so much about the essential essence of the place…about what it is really like.
May 28th, 2008 by francis
I’ve been thinking more about comments that I made in response to a post by Carl Honoré on his blog. Although sitting idly and wilfing might seem like something that the Sloth Ethic would thoroughly approve of, perhaps this shouldn’t always be the case.
There may seem like no better waste of time than an unhurried surf through gentle waves of useless information, but in reality it is hard not to find yourself click-clicking away increasingly frenetically. Like in faerie, one hour passes to you and then you get up from the couch and find that four hours have passed…and for some strange reason, you’re tired. That’s not taking it easy, that’s compulsion. The same as when you find yourself checking that forum, just one more time, to see if someone has responded to that post you made. And feeling strangely dissatisfied if they haven’t. Or getting into arguments that in real life would make everyone point at the participants and laugh.
Research into gambling addiction has show that the act can bring a hit, a physical, measurable change in brain chemistry. Norepinephrine, dopamine, beta-endorphins flooding out and providing the reward that the brain craves…and wants again. If staying too long on the click trail does something similar, that would explain the compulsive nature of it (just one more link…just one more article on Metafilter…just one more look at that forum…).
And compulsion is the antithesis of the Sloth Ethic way, because part of the beauty of slowing down is that you take control of your own life again, in a world which is endlessly trying to take it from you.
May 4th, 2008 by francis
The Sunday Times rich-list always gets a lot of coverage every year. So it’s good to see the Independent on Sunday run a Happy List.
Who would you add?
Apr 24th, 2008 by francis
IT TAKES, IT TAKES A BUSY MAN
he hadn’t made a dent
in his list for weeks.
one of the items was “call z.”
then one day z’s wife called to say
that z had died.
he was ashamed to catch himself
indulging in a feeling of accomplishment
as he crossed “call z” off his list.
(a poem by Gerald Locklin, from Children of a Lesser Demagogue, 1987. Found via Sean Casey’s article for the Kenyon Review)
Apr 19th, 2008 by francis
Slow Planet is now live.
The brainchild of Carl Honoré (author of IN PRAISE OF SLOW), Geir Berthelsen (founder of the The World Institute of Slowness), and Dale+Bang, (a Norwegian communications firm involved in social responsibility work in Third World development and music), Slow Planet is:
…the global meeting place for all things Slow. It is an open community where citizens interact on an equal footing.
Check it out, and give it your support.
Apr 2nd, 2008 by francis
“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
I have started this occasional series with a post about Lin Yutang. After all, he’s given this blog its tagline quote, (”If you spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.’” so it’s only fair that I return the favour.
Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer and inventor. He was born in Fukien province in 1895, and died in 1976, at his home in Taiwan. He picked up degrees from St John’s Shanghai, Harvard and Leipzig, and was Professor of English at Beijing National University until he was forced to leave in 1926, blacklisted as a radical professor. After 1928, he spent most of his life in the United States (in a great quote, he says that he ‘liked the revolution but tired of the revolutionists’).
His translations of classic Chinese works into English helped popularize many of them in the West, and he invented a typewriter that could type Chinese, and a toothbrush that also dispensed toothpaste. I particularly like the latter: there’s nothing like a slightly bizarre and slightly useless invention to suggest that someone is an interesting and eccentric person.
His key work is the magnificent The Importance of Living, first published in 1937, which Yutang described as “lyrical philosophy”. The high quality of his philosophy can be seen in chapters like those on The Importance of Loafing, Lying in Bed, Smoking and Drinking Tea. And who cannot love anyone who writes: “I want to write about the philosophy of sitting in chairs because I have a reputation for lolling”.
What better way to get a feel for Dr Lin’s thinking, than to read more thoughts of the man himself. Here are some quotes from that book, and from others:
“Time is useful because it is not being used. 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 life endurable”
“A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.”
“Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely.”
“…it is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, ‘Life is beautiful.’ ”
“The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.”
“The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and sweet irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance, and who alternately wake up from life’s dream and then nods again, feeling more alive when he is dreaming than when he is awake, thereby investing his waking life with a dream-world quality.”
“I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher…”
“My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.”
“O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!”
Amazon has The Importance Of Living. When it arrives, make a cup of tea, sit back, and enjoy reading it.
(photo by Carl Van Vechten)
Mar 26th, 2008 by francis
There are some excellent other places to visit which touch themes close to our heart, and I’d like to spend a little time in this article looking at them. We’ll come back and explore each of these sites in more depth in later articles.
The bible of the Slow movement is Carl Honore’s excellent In Praise of Slow. You can see Carl’s site here, and learn about his new book out in March 2008: it’s called Under Pressure and it’s about childhood in the 21st century. Carl’s also developing Slow Planet, which plans to be a global hub for the Slow revolution…very much looking forward to this site going live, and when it does we’ll post more about it here.
Slow Down Now is the almost serious antidote to workaholism, and features a beginners guide to slowing down, a manifesto for a slower lifestyle, and all sorts of other good stuff. You can sign up to their announcement list to hear about when new stories are featured on the site (a leisurely paced four to six weeks). Don’t forget to check out Christopher’s excellent Slow Down Now blog, too.
The Idler have been doing this sort of thing for years. It’s a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic, and wants to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject.Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle and How To Be Free are books which develop and expand upon the Idler’s philosophy.
Anxiety Culture is a web magazine with a wealth of ideas and gimmicks for navigating the crazy, paranoid, work-obsessed, media-crapulent times we live in.
Slow Leadership may at first appear like another blog about leadership in business, but it’s a trojan horse, bringing ideas about humane and slow approaches to work right into the heart of The Beast. From the same people, I think, is Slower Living, a site of thoughts, tips and ideas for those who want to slow down and savor life to the full.
Part of the reason for slowing down and fighting the tide of must do when do shall do should have done is to achieve a life that has more joy in it. Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project is a memoir about the year she spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study she could find.
Do spend some time meandering around these sites. They’re well worth it. Then afterwards, make a cup of tea or coffee, and spend some time just gazing out of the window. That’s worth it too.
Mar 24th, 2008 by francis
Is that the time? Really?
Ah well, eight months since the last post might be a disaster if this blog was concerned with maximising your productivity, or how to be a millionaire by the time you are twenty, or how to achieve a three hour work week (a simple plan: undercut the four hour work week guy, steal lots of readers, spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, dreading the arrival of the two hour work week guy), or how to avoid procrastination.
But it’s not a disaster, because after all, this is blog about maximising your idling time, and how to fit as many hours of daydreaming into miserable fifty-hour work weeks as possible. Still, I hope to post a little more frequently than once ever eight months. Torpor permitting.
So, what is this blog about?
It’s an expression of the idea that many of us don’t spend enough quality time not getting things done.
You won’t find advice here about how to get by on half the sleep you really need. You won’t find checklists to micromanage every last movement of your life, tracking and monitoring and listing it all in systems of such increasingly baroque complexity that you spending more time organising your life than you do living it (although I do have a sneaking admiration for such ingenious and creative schemes for work avoidance, they are perhaps overkill when simply staring out of the window at the leaves floating slowly to the ground would do).
Instead, you’ll find some ambling and meandering around ways to stay sane and keep your own space in an over-pressurised world, a world in which even language gets subverted and perverted to further the ideology that work in itself, and to the exclusion of everything else, is virtuous. This is an idea championed and promulgated by the Puritans. They banned dancing, they banned plays, I’m sure that they frowned on smiling, and they definitely wore ridiculous hats. This last alone should give pause for thought. Along with enemy-of-the-people Stakhanov, the Puritans haunt our nightmares here at The Sloth Ethic. They skulk in the corners, brandishing infinitely long lists, scowling from underneath the brims of their stupid hats.
Here, we’ll be finding virtue in staring blankly into the middle distance while your tea cools. In gazing out of the window and idly assembling the clouds into a whole zoo of animals. In walking slowly, with no particular place to go, and no idea what you are going to do when you eventually get there. Sitting in meetings, watching two rain drops slide down the window and betting on which one will reach the bottom first. Not falling for the illusion that a full planner means a full life.
Not just stopping to smell the roses, but putting a deckchair next to them and sitting around there for a while.
The Sloth Ethic will find the most absurd examples of productivity taken to extremes, of language made hollow in the service of the work ethic, and we will poke them with sticks and laugh. And then we’ll sit down for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Because, you know, there’s really no hurry. No hurry at all.
I hope you enjoy reading it, and it passes some time you could otherwise have spent being productive, or Getting Something Done which would probably turn out to have no grand meaning in the scheme of things anyway.
Do leave a comment and say hello. And most importantly of all…take it easy.
Mar 23rd, 2008 by francis
…the Sloth Ethic awakes.
More soon.