The Sloth Ethic

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”
(Bertrand Russell)

The Sloth Ethic is dedicated – in a lackadaisical, slipshod sort of way – to the idea that many of us don’t spend enough quality time not getting things done.

I posted sporadically on a blog with the same name a little while ago, which mostly reflected my amusement at the cult of productivity on the web. Since then, I’ve read a lot about what makes people happy, about the slow movement, and seen too many people I like made ill by the pressure of work or the conditions of the workplace, by the treadmill that keeps them running just to stay still.

So I’ve decided to relaunch the blog. Although I’m still going to take great delight in laughing at the absurdities of the productivity culture, and all of the fetishism that surrounds it, (and the odd post from the previous blog may reappear), the Sloth Ethic will have a wider range.

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 here at The Sloth Ethic, we 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 dancing 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.

Tags: idling, not getting things done, slacking, sloth, slow, unproductivity