What Is an Idler?

Tom Hodgkinson consults Dr Johnson, William Blake and Socrates to answer the burning question

What, exactly, is an idler? It’s an excellent question and one that’s been at the top of my mind for over 30 years (we produced issue one of the magazine in 1993).

One authority on this tricky issue would be Dr Johnson. He wrote a series of columns under the byline “The Idler” in 1758 and 1759 which appeared in a weekly eight-page publication called The Universal Chronicle, a kind of cross between The Week and The Spectator. Other columns and mags of the day included the Tatler, the Observer, the Rambler and the Wanderer. The new breed of Grub Street hacks were getting paid to bumble around town and record their observations.

Johnson’s Idler essays were themselves a way of avoiding work. He said that he took on the job as a result of an “aversion to a labour he had undertaken” which was an edition of Shakespeare. (This is quite a good trick: in order to get something done, start one project as a way of avoiding another project).

In the first essay, which was published on Saturday 15 April, 1758, Johnson outlined the characteristics of an idler.

The Idler, he says, is an Epicurean insofar as he is happy with the bare necessities. The Idler is “satisfied with what he can most easily obtain”. This is good because he or she “escapes labours which are often fruitless, but sometimes succeeds better than those who despise all that is within their reach.”

A recent version of this idea can be found in the 1970s utterances of Johnny Rotten: “I don’t want a house in the country,” he said. “I’m very happy where I am.”

Idlers are not exactly lazy. They are capable of intense bouts of concentrated labour. “The diligence of an idler is rapid and impetuous.” The way they work has something in common with the principle of momentum: there is a long period of reflection and thought and procrastination before the real work starts, just as “ponderous bodies forced into velocity move with a violence proportionate to their own weight.”

We might make another definition, which is to find something you love doing and get someone to pay you to do it. “Find a job you love and you’ll never work again.”

“Work” could be defined as something you don’t want to do. If you do want to do it – whatever it is, and it could be banking – then it’s not work. As DH Lawrence put it in his 1929 poem “A Sane Revolution”:

Let’s abolish labour, let’s have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it’s not labour.
Let’s have it so! Let’s make a revolution for fun!

Aristotle would have advised that it would be difficult to be a full-time idler, as of course we all need money to survive. He said that we need to work in order to create the leisure time during which to be idle. But that we should not overwork. He would have agreed with Bernie Sanders who has just said that we should be aiming for a 32-hour working week.

In my own case, I’m often accused of working too hard and being insufficiently idle for someone who promotes the idling creed. My answer to this is that I retired when I was 34. At that point I gave up all the work I was doing simply for the money and since then I have pretty much done exactly what I wanted every day. (And it’s not always been easy, to be sure.) My work is play, and I will never retire, as I have nothing to retire from.

In the end perhaps being an idler is something to do with being mentally free, with having escaped Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”, and living a life with plenty of time for reflection and for aimless wandering. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates, the ultimate idler, put it.

What about you? Are you an idler? What is an idler? How can we create a more idle future? Answers in an email please (or a postcard).

PS Looking forward to seeing you at the first in a new season of “A Drink with the Idler” this evening. At 6pm we’ll be talking to author and sensitivity expert Jenn Granneman. Click here to register.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: This inspired me, thanks Tom. In my company fun is probably our no. 1 goal. But I felt guilty about that lately. Something about dying children in Africa and environmental issues made me think fun is a spoiled westerner luxury. But if DH Lawrence could proclaim a fun revolution in 1929 it removes all guilt. Now I am more like: Just working on a very old dream.
Karsten Madsen

Sir: I sold a small company several years ago, and trousered a small (in bankers’ terms) but significant amount of dosh. I was in my mid-thirties then, and have been idle in the near two decades since. (“Idle” in, I like to think, the Johnsonian sense – or the Hodgkinsonian – meaning I’ve done work but never just for money and frequently for none at all).
My challenge now is that the money’s running out: while I’ve pared down expenses to extend my run of idleness for as long as possible, I’m no epicure: a man still needs good wine, to eat well. And perhaps most importantly (and, these days, expensively) a pleasant part of the world in which to live, in quarters commodious enough to invite and entertain one’s friends, and random people one meets around the place. (This is how I expand my social circle: if I meet someone interesting I invite them to supper.) I should perhaps also say that I’m no country mouse: I live in perhaps the most expensive city in the world (not London incidentally) and cannot do without the pleasures of the urbs – the theatre, the music, the bustle.
And so this challenge – the imminent exhaustion of my Idling funds – has brought me to an interesting spot. Namely: I need to earn, at an age where I cannot get a job. (The corporate world, quite understandably, rejects those who have rejected it – especially if later they come crawling back, cap in hand.) Even if someone offered me a job I wouldn’t last long. I’d be bound to end up telling someone important to fuck off.
So what to do? It seems I must live upon my wits: write a book or a play. But this is fantasy, surely? Not least because the nature of the arts is such that only Lloyd-Webber league commercial triumph can match the sums with which the business world rewards even small-scale success. (By which I mean: a small and unknown company, such as mine was, can be sold for sums that would require the sale of literally millions of books, or a years-long West End run).
Oh and then there’s the fact that you need talent (of which I may have none) and luck (of which I’ve had much in life so far – but maybe that’s run out too.)
No sob-story this – it’s a fascinating conundrum and one on which a final assessment of my life, at grave’s edge, will hinge. If I pull something off, my decision to idle, from my mid-thirties onwards, will be vindicated. If I fail I will become – to friends, family and myself – a cautionary tale: the pleasure-seeking grasshopper who looked with pity on the cautious ants but now lacks shelter from the rain and wind.
But when I think of Aesop’s ant and grasshopper I console myself with another of his fables, the starving wolf who meets his well-fed, collar-wearing cousin – and refuses to make the trade. My dependents (I have some – a relevant point since I would, myself, be happy eating porridge in a hut) may not thank me but I shall remain grasshopper-wolf till the grave. My hope is that, whatever outcomes await, my choices will come to be seen by others for what, I hope, they are: not indulgent selfishness, but a commitment to the freedom of the human spirit.
Anon

Sir: Poetry, this: “My work is play, and I will never retire, as I have nothing to retire from.”
Michael

Sir: Loved this piece, Tom. Spot on.
John Lloyd