It’s been an eventful 12 months. Tom Hodgkinson sums up the year that was

Welcome to 2023. Let’s hope this year affords many idling opportunities. This week we’re reviewing last year through the medium of my newsletters.

In January I was inspired by the American “antiwork” movement to look back at an older anti-work movement, the Cynical branch of philosophy, as represented by the anti-consumerist Diogenes, who had no job, no house and no possessions.

Tech is always in the news. Just today the company formerly known as Facebook has been fined $390m for breaking the EU’s digital privacy laws, burying key clauses in its interminable privacy statement, which all users are forced to click. You could argue that the EU’s lawmakers have been a mite supine, I mean, I was pointing out this sort of thing fifteen years ago, but better late than never. In February I wrote about my own attempts to resist the tyranny of tech.

On 24 February Putin invaded Ukraine and in the same month a young Ukrainian, Julia Lasica, started work at the Idler. She told us about Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko, and contributed a piece about him to the Idler’s website in March.

In April we were delighted to announce that Idler hero Jarvis Cocker would be headlining our festival. This was a chance to reflect on his newly published memoir and his working practices which, as he cheerily admits, are characterised by extreme slowness.

Lottery winners Jo and Jess Thwaite hit the headlines in May, winning £184 million, making them richer than Adele. The middle-aged couple from Gloucester voiced an admirably Idler-ish sentiment when they said that the money would free them from toil. “We now have time to dream,” they said.

June saw Brits celebrating the Royal Jubilee. The Queen and her ministers granted her subjects an extra day off on Friday 3 June, giving us a four day weekend. I celebrated this monarchical mandate for merry-making and idling.

Maths genius June Huh made the news in July for his unusual work ethic, or lack thereof. A profile of the 39 year old Princeton professor, who won the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics, put his success down to his canny appreciation of the power of idling. “On any given day,” read the interview, “Huh does about three hours of focussed work.”

I took a break from newsletters in August but at the end of July, I sent out a brief argument against holidays and in favour of staying at home, citing the Situationists, Christ, Pascal and Evelyn Waugh.

Liz Truss dominated the papers in September. She and Kwasi Kwarteng launched their disastrous “mini budget” with its tax cuts for the rich. I was not a fan of Truss anyway, because she is a fervent promoter of hard, hard work for the masses. My newsletter “Silly Liz” suggested that she should pay closer attention to the work of John Maynard Keynes, who was both against tax cuts for the rich and who also believed in the coming of the 15 hour week (this was the most opened newsletter of the year).

Elon Musk is rarely off the front pages, probably because he thinks that being very famous is good for his share price. In October he was in the news because he decided to buy Twitter. Musk said he was going to turn it into a subscription service but I commented that he’d need an awful lot of paying subscribers to make up for the five billion a year Twitter sells in ads. Events since seem to suggest that the reign of this clown capitalist is coming to an end.

November saw the dramatic and gripping fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the young crypto broker who seemingly conjured a load of money out of thin air and then gave it to politicians and to the owners of luxury penthouses in the Bahamas, all the while projecting an air of saintliness via a website called Effective Altruism. In my piece, I put him in a long line of bubble blowers through history.

My final newsletter of the year in December reflected on the meaning of that lovely old word, “merry”.

And as for 2023, did you know that this year marks 30 years of the Idler? Yes, my pal Gavin Pretor-Pinney and I published issue one in August 1993 following a short delay caused by watching Wimbledon. Our cover star was Dr Johnson.

Plans for the year of our third decade include retreats in April and September, a truly special festival in July at Fenton House in Hampstead, the publication of a commemorative book in November, followed by a Christmas party in December, when we’ll announce the winners of our Idler of the Year Awards.

But I won’t get excessively busy. When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, we should learn from Dr Johnson. Every year from the age 25 to his sixties, he made the mistake of resolving to work harder the following year. This endless resolving did not have the desired effect, and therefore only made him feel guilty.

So my resolution for 2023 is a very simple one: “Be more idle.”

PS: We’re holding a January sale! All our brilliant, mind-expanding and quirky Idler Academy courses are half price till the end of the month. Click here to see what’s on offer.

Our January/February issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Sainsbury’s, Booth’s and Easons.

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