Why I'm not Doing Dry January

Tom Hodgkinson on the right to drink and be lazy

Since you ask, no, I’m not “doing” Dry January. I can’t be bothered and in fact I’m at a loss as to why people should choose January, of all the months, to give up wine and beer, those heart-gladdening gifts from the gods.

Surely January is the time when we need the consolations of Bacchus the most, dreary, cold and depressing month that it is?

January is also of course the most feared month for the freelance fraternity, to which many of you belong. They must not only submit their tax return but also pay their dues to the Inland Revenue by 31 January if they want to avoid scary letters written in red ink, huge fines and even visits from the King’s tax inspectors. For many freelancers this means that January is poverty-making on top of being depressing in many other ways.

If anything, we should resolve to drink more than normal in January, and save the self-flagellation for another month, or never.

But maybe I’m just lazy – which brings me to the subject of that classic text in the Idler’s canon, The Right to Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue, originally published in French under the title Le Droit à la Paresse, and recently republished by NYRB Classics.

Paul Lafargue was Karl Marx’s multi-racial son-in-law. He wrote this pamphlet in 1880 while in prison. It was an attack on a previous essay called “The Right to Work”, which was based on the strange idea, beloved by the authoritarian left, that all human beings have a natural propensity for toiling ten hours a day for pennies in horrific factories, while enriching their masters. Work, say the authorities, gives meaning and purpose to life. Get a job.

Lafargue argued that in fact the real purpose of life was to laze around doing nothing as much as possible. Leisure, as the ancient philosophers and poets argued, is a gift from the gods.

I recently appeared on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze to defend idling. One of the panellists, Giles Fraser, said, “Well I suppose there’s a difference between idling and laziness.” I agreed. When I started the Idler, my intention was to change the associations of the word “idle” and to make it into a positive: it would mean a grabbing hold of life and a refusal to submit to slavery and a half-life. Paradoxically that requires some energy and courage.

The word “laziness” is perhaps more closely related the idea of “sloth” which, as Rachel Kelly points out in the current issue of the Idler, was originally known as “accidie” and meant something close to “depression”. Accidie and sloth are similar to what we may call “ohwhatsthepointness”, when we survey the various duties and tasks and appointments before us and say, “Oh, what’s the point?”

Or as Kerry Mucklowe in This Country put it so memorably: “We’re all gonna die anyway so what’s the point in doing anything?”

However the kind of laziness defended by Lafargue is a very good sort of laziness. It’s a resistance to oppression. So I think I would defend physical laziness, while cautioning against the kind of spiritual laziness which leads to selfishness.

If that makes any sense at all.

PS: Don’t forget to take advantage of our 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.