In this extract from his 2004 book How to be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson celebrates the pleasures of staying in

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out the window
One can see the way of heaven.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (c. fourth century BC)

Staying in is the new going out” was a joke I made at a meeting once. I was working at the Guardian newspaper on special projects, and we had developed a homes-and-interiors supplement called “Space.” The task was to fire up the advertising department with enthusiasm about this new section, and I sought to do this by virtue of what I considered to be this terribly witty line.

Though daft and glib, there remains some truth in the comment. Going out all the time can be oppressive. It’s hard work. Trying to keep up with the latest bar, club, movie, gallery, show or band is a full-time occupation, and one always feels as if there is something better going on somewhere else. One goes to a trendy bar and feel au courant for a few minutes, until one learns that in the depths of this trendy bar is a VIP room; perhaps that is where the real action is, you think. Get into one of these VIP rooms, and you’ll find that the really cool people have just gone up to a private hotel room. Get to the private hotel room, and you find you are talking to the hanger-on rather than the star. Talk to the star, and discover they are boring. It’s all really too much psychic effort. So the declaration that you are going to “stay in” is a little victory for the soul, I believe. It means that, for a night at least, you have put aside the world and its seductions. You have said to yourself, “I don’t care.” You are going to create your own little paradise of duvets, televisions and pizzas, your own castle of indolence.

On a simple level, of course, staying in is the idler’s dream, because of the low physical effort involved. It avoids the tedious and costly business of getting ready, leaving the house, travelling somewhere else, attending the function and then enduring the still more tedious and costly business of getting home again at the end of it all. The entertainment is often undertaken out of duty, and is not of one’s own choosing. Planned schemes of merriment, as Dr Johnson rightly pointed out, rarely turn into the best evenings, which are usually the unplanned ones, when you have abandoned yourself to fate and chance and chaos.

Beyond the obvious attractions of staying at home, there are also social and spiritual benefits to this particular piece of inaction. First and foremost, staying at home represents an attack on the “go” culture that surrounds us. Walking through any city during the day, one can hardly fail to notice the number of billboards and shop titles that exhort us to go. Go go go! TV channels batter us with images of skydivers, bungee jumpers, skateboarders, snowboarders, jet-skiers, surfers, mountain bikers, off-roaders, and their message is clear: Get out there, dude! Awesome! Don’t just sit at home! Do something! Do anything! Don’t stop. Don’t think. Go for it! Just do it!

The idler surveys this dismal mishmash of lifestyle options and decides: just don’t do it. Just don’t. Don’t go – stop. Instead of going he decides to stay and simply be. The idler has a soul which requires contemplation, and instead of diverting activity holidays and theme nights out he has a vague dream of sitting in a shack on a hillside in China, a wispy beard on his chin and a wise and merry smile on his lips, reflecting on the beauty of nature and the folly of man. Indeed, many of our wisest thinkers have counselled staying in.

The lines from the opening of this chapter were from the classic of Chinese philosophy, the Tao Te Ching. Written around the fourth century BC, its authorship is uncertain but many scholars attribute the sayings it contains to a writer called Lao Tzu. The Tao Te Ching is the principle text in the Chinese vein of thought known as Taoism. Full of paradox, its central tenet is wu wei, or the philosophy of inaction. Those wild old chuckling Chinese loved the image of the river, which takes the course of least resistance on its path from mountain to sea, and in doing so creates unique and beautiful curves. Wu Wei is about going with the flow in one’s everyday life; it is about surrendering one’s destiny to fate and gently floating downstream with detachment, wonder and wisdom. I suppose that the aphorism “good things come to those who wait” would be one way of putting it. The Taoists believe that there is an unseen force directing events, and the wisest course is to give in to that force and surrender our Canute-like vanity:

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail

Being busy, bothering, doing things: all are a waste of effort, like trying to row upstream. They amount to a lot of huffing and puffing and very little movement. Politically, Taoism preaches a similar wisdom. People make too much effort, it says. Politicians should stop interfering and let the people get on with it.

It is because those in authority are too fond of action
That the people are difficult to govern

My own theory is that the world is divided into two types: the idle and the anti-idle. The anti-idle I hereby christen “botherers”. Botherers are people who simply cannot help interfering in other people’s lives. They lack imagination, believe in hard work, exploitation and hypocrisy, and make perfect politicians, bureaucrats and fat cats. They want to make something happen, but they don’t really care what it is. They impose their beliefs on others by force or law, coercion and newspapers, and justify their actions by saying they have created jobs, or cut costs, or increased spending or made profits for their shareholders. “Something must be done!” is their motto. And they do things, like building skyscrapers, call-centres, dams and motorways, but they also love to interfere with the plans of others – denying planning permission to increase the window size of an old barn by an inch, for example. What is worse is that the botherers, not content with doing things themselves, are constantly trying to force us poor idlers to do things as well. The baldest example of this can be seen in the recent history of the UK government’s attempts attempts to force the happily unemployed into meaningless and demeaning full-time employment. “The modern state,” wrote C.S Lewis in 1958, “exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or make us do something.” Rather than finding people “things to do,” wouldn’t it be a more sensible approach to help us enjoy doing nothing? In newspapers, the botherers provide reams of unsolicited advice to poor people.

The terrible thing is that the people who do things, the botherers, make such a mess of it. The great French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who is most celebrated for his modestly titled Pensées – Thoughts – but who also invented public transport, reflected on this theme. Pensées (1670) was intended as a defence of Christianity as the only true religion, and as such it jars with modern pluralist sensibilities. However, there is so much quality thought in it that it’s well worth a look. Here is how Pascal sees society’s botherers:

Sometimes, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. A man wealthy enough for life’s needs would never leave his home to go to sea or besiege some fortress if he knew how to stay at home and enjoy it. Men would never spend so much on a commission in the army if they could bear living in town all their lives, and they only seek after the company and diversion of gambling because they do not enjoy staying at home.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Amin, Mussolini: before all else, they were simply petty-minded bureaucrats writ frighteningly large. They took advantage of the anxiety of their people to present a promise of of total efficiency which the people, in their weakness, were both comforted and deceived by. “Most of the world’s troubles seem to come from people who are too busy,” wrote Evelyn Waugh. “If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we would all be.”

Those who take time off, who step back to look at the world, the lazy ones, the ones who can’t be bothered, the writers, the poets and musicians, these people do much to make life worth living in terms of producing a culture, but they tend not to get involved in the running of things, the management of the infrastructure… And this is because they find all that sort of thing so utterly dull. Instead of trying to change the way other people live, they focus on transforming their own lives. Were it not for the celibacy, teetotalism and general lack of fun, I would have said that monks have a good life. They have retreated from the world and devoted themselves to prayer and study. Indeed, it is the reflective and time-rich monks, free from the demands of making money and keeping with the fashions, all of which is terribly hard work, who created much of the world’s great art and writing in the Middle Ages.

At home, you can be wild and free. G.K Chesterton, in What’s Wrong with the World [a collection of essays], attacked the notion that domesticity is somehow constricting. He argued the opposite: “[T]he home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim … A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure this would not be permitted at the Savoy …”

The greatest piece of staying-in literature ever composed is A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans, published in 1884. Huysmans was a decadent fin de siécle writer with a bourgeois day job – he worked as a clerk at the Ministry of Interior for thirty years. But at night he allowed his literary imagination to roam free and created some of the most fascinating works of the period. A Rebours, which translates as “Against Nature”, is a study of a wealthy dandy called Des Esseintes. Having exhausted the pleasures of town and failed to find the meaning of life in weird sex and late nights, he decides to retreat to a hillside mansion and create his own artificial reality, a peculiar paradise of colour, smell and beauty, controlled by ingenious mechanical devices. He is motivated by an idleness of the body and a snobbishness of the mind. He doesn’t want to exert himself; he doesn’t want to consort with his fellow human beings, whom he regards as irredeemably vulgar. Bothering itself, to Des Esseintes, is vulgar. With inner resources and books, there is no need to move about, to “go”:

Travel, indeed, struck him as a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience … no doubt for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.

Des Esseintes can’t bear the empty materialism of the world and the perceived philistinism of his fellow human beings:

He could detect such inveterate stupidity, such hatred of his own ideas, such contempt for literature and art and everything he held dear, implanted and rooted in these mean mercenary minds, exclusively preoccupied with thoughts of swindling and money-grubbing and accessible only to that ignoble distinction of mediocre intellects, politics, that he would go home in a fury and shut himself up with his books.

Husymans’s intention was to write about a character who “has discovered in artificiality a specific for the disgust inspired by the worries of life and American manners of his time. I imagined him winging his way to the land of dreams, seeking refuge in extravagant illusions, living alone and apart, far from the present day world, in an atmosphere suggestive of more cordial epochs and less odious surroundings”.

So, free of all the bothering go-getters, Husymans sets about creating his indoor wonderland. Helped by a couple of bemused servants, he uses his considerable wealth and imagination to build and absurdly extravagant reality. His first act is to sleep during the day and come alive at night:

What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.

Perhaps the best known of Des Esseintes’s innovations is the golden tortoise. He has a fancy that it would be amusing to have an ornament in his sitting room which actually moved around, so orders a tortoise to be plated with gold and encrusted with jewels. Another caprice is an invention he calls the “mouth organ,” a complex machine that delivers drops of various different liqueurs from an array of stops, the idea being to mix them up on a plate and create a symphony of flavour. He also orders the most fragile, delicate and over bread hothouse flowers to festoon his house. There is a nice dark vein of humour that undercuts the earnest descriptions of Des Esseintes’s experiments: the tortoise, he notices one evening, has dies, and after a lengthy description of the “mouth organ,” Des Esseintes finds that he can’t be bothered to go through the whole palaver and simply helps himself to a shot of whiskey before sitting down. Needless to say, the flowers all die too.

Eventually Des Esseintes is defeated by the botherers. His style of living makes him ill, and he is told by various doctors that he must move back to Paris and get out there, have fun and talk to people. Otherwise, “insanity quickly followed by tuberculosis” will be his fate. Des Esseintes gives in to their advice with bad grace: “Had he not outlawed himself from society? Had he heard of anybody else who was trying to organise a life like this, a life of dreamy contemplation? Did he know a single individual who was capable of appreciating the delicacy of an idea, or whose soul was sensitive enough to understand Mallarmé and love Verlaine?”

Des Esseintes’s project may have been a failure, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take inspiration from his heroic attempt to elevate his soul via interior furnishings. The problem today is that the vogue for interiors has become such an industry, such a popular hobby, that it has fallen prey to the same anxieties as any other part of life, viz: am I cool, am I rich? We use our clothes and our home decoration to display our coolness and our wealth. Coolness has been elevated to such a high status that it exerts the same power over us that the virtues of “good taste” or “refinement” or “cleanliness” once did. “It’s so cool!” we might say of a friend’s bachelor pad, in the same way that one hundred years ago, we might have said approvingly, “It’s very clean.”

The interiors magazines and TV programmes which depict impossibly idyllic lives all have their part to play in this conspiracy to make us feel small. “Get the look” is the line that magazines use, when they run a list of products similar to the ones we have seen in the celebrity sitting room. This is all pure fantasy: the home is not idyllic, the object will not help us “get the look,” and still less will it bring any lasting contentment beyond the initial thrill of the purchase, to say nothing of the huge amount of work involved in getting the look. Moreover, the objects are listed in the hope that the manufacturers will buy advertising in the magazine thus increasing the magazine’s profits, and they prey on our insecurities to make us buy things. They make us feel bad: in The Simpsons, Marge reads a magazine called Better Homes which has the tagline “Than Yours.” The aim of the interior, to my mind, should be to help us escape from the world outside, not to bring it into our own homes, rather in the same way that the idler escapes from the outside world by retreating into his or her own mental interior world. Where do you think? In your head; in your bed.

This alternative interiors ideal is to be found in Chinese writing and also in in the lifestyle of the Bohemians, the freewheeling, pro-smoking Bloomsbury set, whom we have encountered already. The Chinese-Bohemian ideal concerns simplicity and harmony with nature. This has the advantage of making an individual interior affordable, too. “We shall build our houses … so simple and elemental in character that they will fit in the nooks of the hills … without disturbing the harmony of the landscape or the songs of the birds,” was the dream of the pre-Bohemian writer Edward Carpenter in 1889.

In a novel by the now-forgotten Ethel Mannin, the hero looks around his unassuming pad with pleasure: “He likes this bare room with its tall window and pale walls and bookshelves and the divan with the hand-woven blue and yellow striped linen cover, and the weathered oak chair with the rush seat, and the blue paint table and the rush-mat … It somehow reduced the business of living to the simplicities.”

Simple also means less work and less shopping. The aesthete Cecil Beaton made a similar plea for people to escape fashion and embrace their own individual style when it came to decorating:

Only the individual taste, in the end, can truly create style or fashion, since it is not concerned with following the wake of others. Hence, whatever an individual taste may choose, be it a stepladder or a wicker basket, it must always be based on deep personal choice, a spiritual need that truly assesses and gives value to that particular ladder or basket. They beauty of these things is somehow transmitted through the personality of the one who chooses. It is in our selection, after all, that we betray our deepest selves, and the individualist can make us see the objects of his choice with new eyes, with his eyes.

Or as Quentin Crisp told the NME in 1981:

Fashion is never having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

If you want to create a comfortable pad, make it personal. A flash, showy-offy place filled with the latest things will only make others feel uncomfortable. “Slavish adherence to the dictates of fashion is a degenerate’s method of bolstering flagging self-esteem,” wrote the editors of the Chap magazine recently. It’s also essential for an idler not to commit to that terrible bourgeois sin of “trying too hard.” Your ideal should not be an ordeal. This is how Beaton describes the house of Dorelia John, wife of painter Augustus John:

No intention to decorate the house ever existed … The colours have gratuitously grown side by side. Nothing is hidden; there is an honesty of life which is apparent in every detail – the vast dresser with its blue and white cups, the jars of pickled onions, the skeins of wool, the window sills lined with potted geraniums and cacti, while close to the windowpanes tits swing on a coconut shell hung from a tree. The Modigliani bust stands with a cactus pot on its head. In the corner of the entrance hall, boxes of apples and croquet mallets are spontaneously thrown together, constituting a picture of life that is full of sentiment and completely lacking in pretension.

The Chinese writer Lin Yutang, in his book The Art of Living (we need more books with such titles: living is an art, not some-thing that you fit around your job), argued that when it came to building houses, wealth was no substitute for imagination:

Luxury and expensiveness are things to be avoided in architecture. This is so because not only the common people, but also the princes and high officials, should cherish the virtue of simplicity. For the important thing in a living house is not splendour, but refinement; not elaborate decorativeness, but novelty and elegance. People like to show off their rich splendour not because they love it, but because they are lacking in originality, and, besides trying to show off, they are at a total loss to invent something else. That is why they have to put up with mere splendour.

“Mere splendour” is the way of the botherer. I’m sure we have all visited houses where huge efforts have been made to keep up with the pressures of fashion. There are pricy artworks dotted around, the sofas are minimal, and yet there is a stifling atmosphere that makes you want to leave five minutes after you have arrived. I personally, perhaps surprisingly, don’t like mess. This is partly because I am a messy person by nature, and therefore overreact to messiness in other people, but also because, as an idler, mess ends up stealing time from you. One lets things descend into chaos because one can’t be bothered to clean up, but then wastes hours trying to find socks or the right knife because everything is everywhere. Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.

Hugh Hefner has perhaps done more than anyone recently to promote the idea of staying in. In the 1660s, his Playboy magazine ran superb features which included the floor-layouts of fantasy bachelor pads. The bed would be the focus, naturally, would have an inbuilt stereo, TV and cocktail cabinet, was probably circular and would certainly have had a leopard skin thrown over it. The Playboy fantasy is a superbly attractive one for most men: sexual liberation, freedom from emotional attachment, plenty of booze and luxury.

Similarly, I once had a brief passion for the classic American throne of comfort, the La-Z-Boy recliner. I loved their total naffness, their sacrifice of style to comfort, their huge size and complex mechanics, the way they can turn from an armchair to lounger to bed, all the while enfolding you in a squashy embrace. They are a kind of Everyman’s A Rebours, a giant hulking piece of manmade machinery designed for total relaxation. At £1,000 each, though, I’ve never had the spare cash to invest in one and have had to settle for a humble armchair and footstool.

The Playboy ideal likewise remained a fantasy for me, but I do still what? Where does it end? Will you, like Scarface, drown in a mountain of cocaine while your citadel is attacked from all sides?

However, the Playboy fantasy pad has been a great source of stimulation for that laudable modern trend, the retro pad. Living in the past is an effective way of retreating from the vulgarity of the present. I have noticed this trait in artists. My friend, John Moore, a musician, once a member of the very noisy band The Jesus and Mary Chain, now likes having the middlebrow radio station Classic FM playing at home. “We like to pretend that the modern age doesn’t exist and we are living in the 1920s,” he says. Deference to a former age is not necessarily mere nostalgia and escapism; it can also be a conscious rejection of the values of consumerism and the feeling of being victimized by the constant search for “the latest thing.” Any former era will do; for me it is the eighteenth century. I have another friend whose house is a shrine to the 1960s: orange plastic chairs, posters of The Monkees, a jukebox and stacks of 45s, all bought second-hand. Advice for idlers: shop at markets, car-boot sales, thrift stores, auctions and on eBay. You will spend less, create more and live more richly than the city broker who blows three grand on a leather sofa.

We should all admire those who hold out for a better way of life and manage to achieve it on small funds. The great retreaters of contemporary times have been CRASS, the anarchist punk group whose fiercely political, anti-capitalist art, music and writing so enlivened the otherwise depressing early eighties. Their influence was huge and helped to inspire a generation of dissatisfied youth to wear nothing but black and spray anarchy signs in bus shelters. But they also practised what they preached, establishing a hippyish, open house commune in the Essex countryside on the edge on London, where they grew their own vegetables, made art and loafed about. I went up to visit one day and found a little paradise: a garden full of sheds, work-shops and flowers, a vegetable patch, an interior that was somewhere between Barbara Hepworth and New Age traveller. Living on a very low income, founder Penny Rimbaud, who was up on the roof laying felt when I arrived, reaffirmed my belief that lack of funds need not be a barrier to creating one’s own patch of paradise. Indeed, it started me thinking that true idleness lies in total responsibility, and that freedom comes from total independence. That’s why I’ve just bought the Reader’s Digest Complete DIY Manual.

Indeed, I have been inspired to create a pub in my own home. For me, the pleasures of staying in revolve around drinking and talking. So I took the unprepossessing scullery in our rented Devon farmhouse and installed a dartboard and two old dining-room chairs which cost £7 each in a local bric-a-brac place. I’ve also added a print of dogs playing pool, fairy lights, a piece of drinft wood, a shove-ha’penny board, beer mats, Hogarth prints, an old scythe which I found on a rubbish tip and postcards of Cornish men eating giant pasties. All these items were either found lying around or were donated by friends. The pub is called The Green Man and my friend Pete Loveday has painted the sign. Through battered casement windows you can see the sub set over the sea, and without stirring abroad I can know the whole world.

From How to be Idle by Copyright © 2005 Tom Hodgkinson published by Hamish Hamilton 2004

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