All hail BoingBoing for bringing these links to the light of day.
First, In Praise of Idleness, which is an excellent, if a bit lengthy, essay defending doing nothing. I may reread this article for the rest of the week so I can be sure to absorb everything he has said.
Second, a more recent article which looks into what people who hang around towns during work hours are actually doing. I really wish I could just camp out on a city block for 24 hours, and see how the world around me changes. I may do just that in the future. You can thank this article for that notion.
Lastly, an episode of This American Life which also explores the Secret Life of Daytime. The episode is an hour long, but all five acts are extremely interesting, and very worth listening to. If you find yourself short on time, just listen to act one, but do yourself a favor and make time for the rest of the show later.
While all of those links are in my linkroll, they were so incredibly cool and interesting that I thought they deserved special mention. It is rare that so many good things appear on the internet at once. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I have one more link to share.
Bonus, from Neatorama (which for those of you who don’t know, is like BoingBoing in its subject matter, but has a different, and in my opinion more appealing, way of presenting it). The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century. This doesn’t have anything to do with the aforementioned links, but is a damn good read.
That last story is from one of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series, which are amazing. This story is proof. If you need more, I have several editions in my bathroom, which I’ll would gladly share. If you want them.
Well, I read the first essay, “In Praise of Idleness.” I must admit, although the ideas are inventive, i’m not impressed very much. I could write an in-depth essay to refute the claims made in “In Praise of Idleness,” but I am, in fact, lazy.
I’ll make a couple points tho:
First of all, the author makes the assumption that the nature of humans is good, and that the concept of good is objective, not subjective. There are many, many, many different philosophic schools of thought that contest this, one of them being Existentialism.
The essay paints a picture of worldly subsistence. In order for the process described by the author, mainly the 4 hours of work daily, to be instated, a blanket effect of appreciation of leisure would have to cover the entire human race.
There will always be people, especially of a greedy or malicious nature, that will work harder than those with the appreciation of leisure in order to gain more wealth and power. This brings up the issue of personal and national safety. One’s enemies or rivals will work harder to overtake the opposing party and eventually destroy them to remove the threat. This is one of the many examples of how if there is one person left in the world not in appreciation of leisure, the system is doomed to collapse.
Overall, the essay is a rejection of common society and contemporary common thought. It may be possible for an individual or a small faction of individuals to live in a subsistence society based upon the appreciation of leisure, but for a large demographic, it would not be possible.
That could be said of any utopian concept. Utopia remains an ideal because you can never get everybody to fall in line. We all read The Giver, right?