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" We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Forward
Live
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" You can become very serious as a parent. That's got to be fought against. "
Tom Hodgkinson
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Against
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" Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Hate
Own
Passion
" Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Work
Travel
Freedom
" To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter. "
Tom Hodgkinson
More
Me
Laughter
" Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Pay
People
Work
" It's pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Good
Life
Poverty
" Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Time
Free
" I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Security
Me
Bear
" All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Poets
Idlers
Even
" If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside. "
Tom Hodgkinson
You
Reading
Work
" The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Pressure
Good
Day
" We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures. "
Tom Hodgkinson
People
Christmas
Dance
" Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun? "
Tom Hodgkinson
Sun
Long
Home
" If we are to make life into a pleasure rather than a struggle, then I would suggest that we have to start with our own mental attitudes. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Struggle
Life
Own
" Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Boredom
Life
Morals
" All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Our
Happy
Technology
" Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off? "
Tom Hodgkinson
Shoes
Grass
Meetings
" There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Work
History
Laziness
" Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Family
Parents
" As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Son
Grind
Mother
" Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Enough
Birds
Winter
" If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Nature
Life
Friends
" We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Work
Result
Shoes
" Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Real
Royal
People
" We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Doing
Silent
Technology
" Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Life
Yourself
Best
" My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Games
Run
Table
" Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Poetry
Support
World
" Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on. "
Tom Hodgkinson
iPad
Teenagers
Us
" My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week. "
Tom Hodgkinson
Working
Week
Patterns