How To Be Idle with Tom Hodgkinson

Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Susie Moore:

Do you sometimes struggle to be idle, to have true downtime, to give yourself a break arrest permission to just be Well, my friend, you might just love this conversation with author Tom Hodgkinson of the Best Seller for nearly 20 years now, how To Be Idol Idle. Tom is a editor and publisher of the Idler Magazine, an author of several books, of course, how to Be Idle and The Freedom Manifesto. He was educated at Jesus College in Cambridge, and he founded the Idler magazine in 1993. He likes to say he had his last proper job in 1997. How To Be Idle has been heralded as a literary gem. It's been translated into many languages and in this conversation, Tom and I speak about how difficult it is to be idle sometimes, what that really means, and even in our busy lives with many moving parts, how we can still snatch and enjoy moments away for ourselves. Tom is funny, he's brilliant and bright, and I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. I give you Tom Hodgkinson, Tom Hodgkinson, a long-term reader here. Welcome to the Let It Be Easy podcast.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Thank you, Susie. And I can see you've got a nice paperback Coffee of the American version of one of my books there.

Susie Moore:

I sure do. I can't tell you how many copies I've bought for France and there are different covers in different countries.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Oh yeah, there different, it's been published in, I don't know, 20 or 25 countries. Wow. And you know what? I wrote it 20 years ago sort of today.

Susie Moore:

I was going to say that we're coming up to the 20 year anniversary next year, I think, right? Yeah,

Tom Hodgkinson:

Yeah. It was published in oh four, but I actually wrote it in oh three. Yeah. So 20 years ago I would've been, well, I think I would've been asleep actually at this time thinking about beer, but earlier in the day for me it's five o'clock, but earlier in the day, I would've been in my back in the study, in the back of the house reading books and trying to put the words together.

Susie Moore:

Well, Tom, can I just say that I first found out about How to Be Idol when I was actually a client of mine when I was working in Sydney. He was about to take an extended trip, we call it a sabbatical in the us and he's like, I've got this book How to Be Idle. And he's like, I just really need it. It's really hard to chill out. I mean, I'm dying to know a few things. Number one, do you still stand by everything 20 years later? Has anything changed for you? And I mean, I'm going for lots of questions at once, so let me pace them out because I'm just excited here. But how did you come to write this book? In my opinion, it's ahead of its time. Was this always something that you just knew and felt and questioned and thought, gosh, the world's gone mad. We all just and hyper overdrive all the time?

Tom Hodgkinson:

Well, actually I published that book 10 years after starting my magazine, the Idler, which was the sort of first step of this that's still going. My friend Gavin and I published Issue one in 1993, and the front cover star was Dr. Johnson. He wrote the first English dictionary and was the great 18th century man of letters. And I just found his character very appealing because he was constantly complaining about not being able to get out of bed in the morning in his diaries. And he was always resolving, next year, I'm going to get up early because I lie in bed until 10 or 12 or even two o'clock in the afternoon. But he was also very productive. So I started to think actually the work ethic, the Protestant work ethic, the Calvinist work ethic that so many of us have been brought up with as kind of natural and normal doesn't necessarily work for everybody.

In fact, you can be particularly for doing something creative or actually arguably almost anything, you can do it better and more efficiently if you work fewer hours and you give yourself more time to think and you give yourself plenty of time to rest. And that was the basis of the idea behind the magazine. And this was 30 years ago, there was a kind of slacker movement, generation X in the air. Nirvana were sort of big at the time. We also had the rave culture here in England. So there was lots of sort of semi underground kind of anti-authoritarian movements if you like. And that fitted in well with the stuff I really enjoyed in the English literature. And our first interviewee in the idler was a guy who's now dead called Terrence McKenna. And I'll talk about being ahead of our time. He was recommending everyone take magic mushrooms.

And that was in 1993. Well, it's a very mainstream idea now, isn't it? Oh, yes. And even Silicon Valley is sort of getting involved and everyone says microdosing. So yeah, it was a gang of people too. I gathered together a load of mates who are really talented and illustrators, writers, artists, graphic designers, and we just put this thing together. But it did have this basic idea that I felt that it started from a personal thing that the work ethic doesn't suit me. It's not because I don't like working. If it's work I enjoy and I've chosen, I can very much enjoy it. But something about the job system didn't, excuse me, too lazy. I just live in bed in the morning. So it is really been a 30 year investigation into that, into how we work, how we live, what are our priorities. And so the book was written in, as I said, about 20 years ago, and I'd already had 10 years of magazine publishing of the idler. This is our latest issue behind me. This is our first issue. I've got one here.

Susie Moore:

My, yes, look at him.

Tom Hodgkinson:

That was a long time ago, not a very commercial cover. It's not really screaming by me on the newsstand, but we hopefully got a little bit better at the commercial side as the years went on. But yeah, so it was really that. It was thinking, well, if I feel this, probably other people think it too. And in fact, when the book came out, I got loads of letters and still do thank you because people say, well, I thought I was a lone thinking like this, and I think it's needed, but it is actually not particularly original. And these things have always been around. I mean, it goes back to Socrates, philosophers, it's even in the Bible. Jesus Christ says, slow down quite a few times, don't worry. Consider the lilies. They tall, not this sort of thing. So it's actually a, and really the book's a sort of collection of my ideas, but they're not really my ideas. I'm resurrecting ideas that have been around for a long time. And then what I've try to do is put in quite a lot of literarian historical stuff that sort of backed up my arguments. So it could be Nietzsche who's saying people worked too hard in the late 19th century, or it could be Oscar Wilde was of the same view, and it was quite amazing going backwards, you could trace this line of men and women who have put these ideas out there that than just your job.

Susie Moore:

Oh my gosh, Tom. So 20 years later, do you stand by everything in how to be idle? I know with time we kind of look back, we change and evolve, or are you like, oh, if there's a 20th anniversary edition, maybe you'd change it or you'd update a couple of things. How do you feel with this now? The content of this book?

Tom Hodgkinson:

Yeah, I think, well, at the time of writing, I've perhaps a little tyrannical in some of the ideas, which were like, no dishwashers, no television. And my reader said, I thought this was supposed to you about being an idol, but you seem to be quite puritanical, actually. So I think I'll be maybe slightly gentler in some of the things. And also over the years a lot of readers have written in to say, Tom, I actually really like my job. I don't want to quit it. Quit your job. Get out of the system. And it's not that easy, is it? To run your own business and to be a freelancer, there's lots of pressures and you don't get that regular paycheck and so on and so forth. So I think a slight mellowing perhaps in some of the ideas, because it is quite radical, and the book that follows it too, is quite radical. I'm picking up lots of radical ideas from past, present and ancient times as well. So the one extreme, if you're thinking about Greek philosophers, for example, you've got the example of someone like Diese who just rejected absolutely all convention. He didn't have a home, he didn't have a job, he had sex in public, he gate crashed parties, he spa at the rich people, he stole their wine.

He opposed himself to Plato, who he thought was really sort of boring, but is still a popular philosopher do, has been cited by, there's a Chinese movement that was in the papers last year called Tang Ping Life flat, young Chinese people saying, actually, I don't want to work 90 hours a week. It's crazy. Leave me alone. I just want to work enough to have a nice life and have time to read and reflect and hang out with my friends. And they cite di ies, but not many people can really be a diy. And Aristotle who came a bit later, he said, well, there's a medium, there's a halfway house. It's not actually a sexy philosophy. Well, a bit of this is a bit of that, not too much. So I think probably just a little bit more moderate, if that makes sense in some of the ideas.

But largely no, and it's very some historical literary book. So obviously those things haven't changed. One thing that I would put it put in now is social media, because that was 93, sorry, 2003 was, I mean, I remember writing a long, long article attacking Facebook in 2008. So 2003, I don't think we had it at all. We did have email and we did have people who were worried about excessive screen time, hence not having a TV because we had young children in my case. So some of these anxieties were around, but there's a whole new lot of anxieties have appeared then all basically computer related. Now people are about ai. We worry about the effect of social media on our children and social media. Well, for lots of reasons, I'm sort of down on it. I think one of them is just of personal. It kind of took away my living journalism writers. We used to be quite well paid, not anymore, because Facebook gets all its stuff basically, essentially for nothing. The content creators, we upload all our stuff on it, and then they sell advertising. My parents were in Fleet Street newspapers in the seventies and eighties. It was a thriving business. They sold a lot of ads and they were well paid, not now.

Susie Moore:

So much has changed. I know. So what would you say about social media in the book now, if there were a social media chapter, and I would mean love to read for the sake of any listeners who haven't read this book. Here are some of the chapter names. I mean time for tea on fishing, smoking, the Art of Conversation Party, time on holidays. I can't get enough of this book. I feel so seen reading this book, but what would you add if there were in the age of social media? What does Tom have to say about that?

Tom Hodgkinson:

It's really, really difficult. I mean, I've been three phases of being fairly militant. I had an idea with a friend that we would start a group, we would start something called the Antisocial Network, and this would be for businesses and individuals who refuse to engage with social media. So you would have a little logo, a SN, like an anarchy sign with an S it or a snake, something like that. We didn't really get very far, but I didn't really have the courage to do that in the end because so many of our readers and staff and contributors, everybody wants you to be on social media and they like contributing to it because people like chatting. They like, oh, oh, no, I think that No, absolutely not.

It's like whether by accidental design, the social media owners, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, they kind of stumbled on something that people just really enjoy it. So on the one hand, I sort of feel, and they wave their hands up and say, well, we don't do anything. If people don't want to use it, they wouldn't use it. It's not our fault. We've turned into the biggest multimillion billion dollar advertising sales companies in the world. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, I know that they really use behavior as techniques to manipulate our behavior. That's why they sell so much advertising because they are very good at search. So they could make people do things. They could arguably even swing an election because Trump can give Facebook so much money that they can actually, with clever advertising, sway that little tiny kind of central column of deas.

So it is probably quite a small number of people you actually need to really, really attack with the advertising. So it's obviously a very, very powerful medium and very powerful force. So my own personal, the way I deal with it is I don't have a smartphone, and I think that gives me a lot of free time and a lot of thinking time, and it means they don't know where I'm, I'm not being recorded, I'm not being listened to, I'm not being advertised out. I'm not being sent up. So no WhatsApp, no nothing, no apps. I don't have a single app, and I can function perfectly well in the world. I have a laptop and a computer and a dumb phone, flip phone, whatever you might call it, brick. And it's okay, life gets more difficult and I feel more and more lonely. The loneliness of the dumb phone user. I mean, there aren't many of us left, and when you find someone who is like, you sort of want to bond with them. So that's not even realistic. I know to say to people, throw away your smartphones. I've been saying that for years. They don't listen.

Susie Moore:

But I think you can do things. Know it would feel lonely. Yeah, it would be lonely.

Tom Hodgkinson:

It would lonely. It'd be difficult. People live their whole lives and particularly younger people. My children, they live on their smartphones, and so I dunno what to do about it. I mean, regulators try. European regulation is very slow, but they can do some good things to stop the kind of CPI. In Silicon Valley, they say it's up to the individual. If you want to turn it off, you don't have to use it. No one's forcing. You don't put a gun to your forehead. But I think when there's so many people on it, there's this kind of social pressure to do it and it has some real downsides. I think the first step is maybe just be aware of the downsides and then develop these techniques. I mean, I read one book. I mean, some of the techniques are fairly sort of basic unsophisticated. I read one book where the guy said, all you could think of a very sophisticated writer was to buy a safe with a timer, open the safe and put your phone in, turn it around, and that you're not allowed to take it out for two hours. That seems

Susie Moore:

Been extreme to me.

Tom Hodgkinson:

It seems to been extreme. Also, you can't really carry the safe around with you. That's not really going to work. So I don't have any solutions at all. You tell me, what do your listeners say? I mean, is it an issue?

Susie Moore:

It is an issue, and I was also just recently reading that Gen Z are going back to Nokia, basic Nokia phones where they can only call and text because they're a real mental health problem. There's so much stress surrounding it. I mean like this, oh, there we go. That's it, Tom. Yes. You can just do the basics. Yes, just the basic phone calls and texts. That's all that's required. So again,

Tom Hodgkinson:

So that's quite encouraging, isn't it? If Gen Z are going to thinking along these lines, because I suppose they've, my generation XI think it, and then the millennials, well the millennials I guess to me, they just look like a load of sheep like beings. They just love the whole thing. And then the Gen Z, the next ones up are like, hang on a second. I don't really want to be sort of monitored. Also, it's kind, it is vanity, it is like they say, an Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, all are striving under the sun. And I think vanity, our own natural vanity accounts for the success of social media to a really large degree. You just want to look good, sound good, be considered to be morally good and so on. Or you just want a kind of sounding off. I mean, I know what it feels like when it's something the way that the medium is the message.

There's something in the nature of Twitter that makes you kind of angry when people, I dunno, this is an example. We do a bit of social media. We have a kind of, I try to delegate it to a younger person in the office, but I do also do it myself sometimes. But we do it via a kind of platform, so you don't get too sucked in. I think that's a good, it's called Hootsuite. That's a good tip. Because you don't see the fees. You just put your post, your post, you put your post up. Yeah, yeah. We're like, okay, if someone finds out about the idler or my books through this, fine, and then they can click on our website and that's where we want to send them. Instagram wants to keep you away from the website. They wants to keep you on Instagram for obvious reasons.

But I think I did an article about, it was called Rage Against the Dishwasher. That's something I put in the book that people really complained about and festival said, what are you talking about idling? And now you're saying, we've got to get rid of the dishwasher. Do you do all your own washing up or does Victoria do it? So I got these quite aggressive comments, but then our dishwasher broke down a couple of weeks ago and we were handwashing for a couple of weeks. I was like, this is really nice. Why do we need the dishwashers? So I read a piece about it and then we put it on social media. I dunno why on Facebook. People said, oh great, yeah, I hate dishwashers. And on Instagram they said they got quite angry and aggressive.

Susie Moore:

It's fascinating

Tom Hodgkinson:

Love.

Susie Moore:

Yeah.

Tom Hodgkinson:

You start sort of walking along the way inventing clever little comments in your head, like clever little responses.

Susie Moore:

I going to say, come

Tom Hodgkinson:

Back and that'll start them out. You go, yeah. Now they'll go away and then they come back with some other horrible comment. They're like, what?

Susie Moore:

And then they got to think about that. I know.

Tom Hodgkinson:

You got to think about that, and then it escalates and then you are, I remember taking my daughter on a, we drove up to Oxford when she was about 11 or 12, and I wanted to take her on a kind of Louis Carroll Day out. Alice in Wonderland goes to the place where he actually sort of wrote the book call where he conceived it with Alice. He was a young Don in Oxford in the late 19th century. Anyway, and I went up with my brother and his daughter and it was a lovely, beautiful day. And we were rowing down the river with our daughters with a picnic and through Christchurch Meadows, and I thought, this is lovely. And then my phone went beep. There was this really, really nasty comment on Twitter about something I said, and I was like, that's not really nice. It

Susie Moore:

Can ruin your day. It can really put a sour mood. It can really implement something that when you're having a very pleasant day down the river with a picnic with your child enjoying. So no, I completely understand and agree with just the intrusion of it all and the convenience, the balance of it all. I think it's always going to be a bit of a question and handled a bit differently by different people. But yeah,

Tom Hodgkinson:

Sorry, you've got to sort out your own way of dealing with it,

Susie Moore:

Your own vibe,

Tom Hodgkinson:

But if you recognize that there could be an issue, it could be hurting your mental health.

Susie Moore:

Oh, yes.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Then there are things you can do, you things about it, and

Susie Moore:

You don't require a say if you can just put it in a drawer, it's allowed. You can also just

Tom Hodgkinson:

Switch it off can. We've got contributors who are very successful sort of people in the world, comedians in London, in England, one called Adam Buckster, one called Stuart Lee, and they've done really well. They're not on social media, you have to be on it. They have a successful public careers. They do podcasts or whatever, they've been on tv, but they just can't be bothered.

Susie Moore:

A lot of actresses, alot of actresses don't either. And one of them even said recently that she thinks she's missing out on roles because she hasn't got the following to post and engage. But so Tom, I live in America and America is the hardworking country. We pride ourselves on getting it done and efficiency, and there are a thousand productivity apps, and I think we go to bed with either peace in our heart or angst based on how much output there was that day and not output that frankly isn't monetized. It's like the what did I do? What did I do to make money? How many hours did I put in? And truly how to be idle is such a must read. Like I said, I've given many friends a copy, especially those who I think really need it. But I've just been with you from day one. I'm just like, well, thank you

Tom Hodgkinson:

So much. It's great. Thanks for contacting me and everything. It's really nice to hear.

Susie Moore:

I'm picking up what you're putting down, Tom. Let me tell you, can I tell you a couple of funny things? I have to share these. I shed with a therapist friend of mine. I was like, this book had to be idle. I sent her a couple of snapshots of lying in bed, having a drink in the morning, going for a walk, making time to think all these things that people feel very guilty doing. Guilty. Yeah. I was like, isn't this amazing this other way of being because people think I'm strange, Tom, and I want to tell you a bit more about that in a moment. And I was like, isn't this amazing? It's like a revolution. The relaxed. I speak often in terms of women, largely my people, my audience, but I'm like the way that we describe women, it's like she's fearless. She's a badass. She gets it all done. And I'm like, what about the relaxed woman? It's a rebellion. It feels like. What about the relaxed woman?

Tom Hodgkinson:

What about the shy women? Some people are shy. I think that I could slightly blame Cheryl Sandberg for all this sort of thing. Oh, interesting. Did you ever Herbert Lean in? Yes,

Susie Moore:

Lean in.

Tom Hodgkinson:

And that became a bit of a sort of cult hit with women who felt it was the kind of feminist statement. It didn't feel that much of a feminist statement to me. It felt more like how to do well within a large corporation. That's not necessarily the same thing as feeding your soul is. It was like, you know what she lent in? She asked for a raise. She got that raise way way. It was this culty thing. And I thought coming from a woman who was a very, very aggressive executive on a very, very aggressive, large social media company with all a bit of a colon, I just remember thinking then, well, my mom's kind of one of these. I mean, my mom was very, very sort of, and still is. He was a huge feminist. And her thing is that he always had to earn more than my dad.

So she competed with him. And so I did grow up with that, and he says, well, everyone has to sort work hard. And whereas my dad kind of dropped out and became a sort of meditating yogi type. So I had these two sort of influences. But yeah, I think that the nobility of rest, the nobility of idleness should be sort of heavily promoted. There's quite an interesting woman who does something called the ministry, the nap ministry in the States, and she's a black woman who's saying that this really is a sort of excellent form of rebellion against a sort of so-called patriarchy or whatever. And it is very similar to what we've been saying in the idler. This is a way of grabbing back some of your own time because if you're working very hard, again, some people it suits. I'm not telling anyone what to do. It's not like an ideology or anything. I'm just thinking out loud, really. I know some people like working really hard and they love their jobs and fine. I mean, that's great. I'm not going to, I'm force them to quit or anything. But there are lots of people who they find work stressful, difficult, and sort of worrying.

Susie Moore:

This is a country of the two week vacation per year too. This is,

Tom Hodgkinson:

It's that even I know

Susie Moore:

And don't want, people aren't taking it. When I shared this book, some snippets from your book with a therapist friend of mine, she works with a lot of high achieving women, and you're talking about all the things that you talk about the Lofas Manifesto had of the idol. She's like, Susie, that book sounds like depression. The idea of not being in a rush, taking your time, even enjoying a hangover. I mean, I just thought, this is so good. She's like, that book sounds like a book about depression.

Tom Hodgkinson:

And I'm like,

Susie Moore:

No, it's the opposite. And I can tell you,

Tom Hodgkinson:

But there is something in that isn't there for some people, if they stop they and start to think about their lives, they start getting depressed. So rushing around is a way of avoiding actually inspection the contents of your own soul. And idling could turn into brooding or melancholy, melancholic reflection and an ode on melancholy by Keat. But so that I sort of think, well, yes, it's actually very cheerful book as you know.

Susie Moore:

Oh, it's so funny. It's such a good book. Yeah.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Stopping doesn't mean getting depressed, but I do recognize that iness and melancholy can be related. I mean, Dr. Johnson was really a depressive. So what your friend is saying is what you mean sort of when you can't get out of bed all day, that means you're sort of depressed and you can't, that's sloth, isn't it? That's just one of the seven dead. The dead

Susie Moore:

Sin. The deadly sin, yes.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Seven deadly sins. And that's like depression. The fact before it was called sloth, it was called depression. That sin, it was called aia, which is the Greek word for depression and misery. You can't bother to get out of bed. You can't God go and say your prayers. So she's absolutely right. There is a link actually. But what I'm trying to do in the book is I've got a version of idling, which is actually quite positive and quite cheerful and actually could lead to all sorts of activity because the most constant criticism I've had since we started this is, oh, well you say you're neither, but you seem to work incredibly hard with these magazines, books, and we are doing a festival with the online courses. We have a school. So there's quite a lot of stuff going on. And so being idle is not necessarily exact the same thing as being lazy or slothful, because what she's talking about is when you give up on life and you can't bother to do anything, and there seems no point in anything. Well, I'm sure we've all felt like that at times. Times. And I think when that happens, you should embrace it and sort wait for it to go away rather than just taking Prozac anyway. But that's another issue.

Susie Moore:

It's such an interesting thing that when I was kind of celebrating some of these ideas and why don't we have a little rest? And I mean, I have a corporate background and kind of like when I was mentioning that you're ahead of your time, the startup or the most recent startup that I worked for was bought by the same company that bought the Huffington Post. And Arian Huffington is this big proponent of sleep. She wrote the sleep revolution, she's on the sleep council, and there was a nap room that no one used

Tom Hodgkinson:

Me,

Susie Moore:

But I like, thank you, Tom. I was like, I'm using this room. Yeah, that's great. It exists for a

Tom Hodgkinson:

Reason. I mean, Ariana Hopping should have been coming down and giving you some kind of award for that.

Susie Moore:

I agree. And I was like, I'm in the nap room guys, and there's a sign I'm in there. And I think everyone else was too scared. And I'm like, well, I've got to model it then somehow for people. And I remember Tom in my nine to five, my nine to five job. I didn't know what took eight hours a day. Well, so I'm ambitious and I'm an idol. They coexist to me.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Yeah, coexist very, very closely. I mean, John Lennon is an idler. I mean, there are lots of very, very successful idol out there because, and entrepreneurs are often idols because as you say, I remember the last job. I had a very similar experience. I can do this in four or five hours. I actually quite, I was working at the Guardian newspaper in the nineties. It was a great job. Eventually my partner then and I left and we quit. We set up on our own. But I know exactly what you mean about the eight hours in the office. It just seemed to be sort of a bit of a waste of my time. Some people played the game, the corporate, the court games, like being at a court, the office politics and so on. Gavin and I, we just enjoyed doing the work itself, and we worked hard. I really enjoyed it. Me too. But yeah, it just seemed a very inefficient way of spending time. Lots of time we're sort of sitting there pretending to work and not really doing anything, which is really weird. But yes. But we were also ambitious. We wanted to do our own thing, write books and run things, own things, this sort of thing. It doesn't have to be massive, but I'd rather be in charge of something small than a cog in something enormous.

Susie Moore:

Oh. Exactly. And isn't everything measured by, I mean, we used to be paid per bushel, for example, and it's like per hour or, that's pretty much how it equates. And I think to myself, now, Tom, people think that I'm very strange because I work from my bed. I don't have a desk, I don't have a desk. And I'm like, I'm a genius. I get to work down. We give

Tom Hodgkinson:

You, if Ariana Huffington didn't give the award, then we're going to Definitely,

Susie Moore:

Yes, please. But people are like, well, how do you, and I'm like, well, I'm lying down. And that's how I like to do it. And then people think it's varies. I also watch a lot of television. I know that's a form of media, and I love to have just completely free days where I like to go to lunch, I like to walk around. We don't call the pubs here, but I like to go to the bar. I like to have a drink there. I like to just chat with the bartender, idly in no rush and have nothing in particular to do there. Nothing. But

Tom Hodgkinson:

Also nothing. Lisa, that stuff will feed back into your other work, won't it?

Susie Moore:

Oh, oh my gosh.

Tom Hodgkinson:

So that's when we get ideas when we're sort of free flowing. It's not when you're sitting at the keyboard and you might do as well, but we need that sort of time to go off and do other stuff. And even from the utilitarian mindset point of view, from any point of view, it's a good idea because you are happier, you're rested, you've got more time for other stuff, but also actually you work better. It's like doctors, I mean just it's very simply put, would you rather have a doctor who had just started was

Susie Moore:

Exhausted, right, shift.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Shift, yeah. Or was at the end of a 90 hour week. No way. I don't want the doctor who's at the end of a 90 hour week. No. So doctors should work three or four days a week. They should have a shorter working week. The working week should be sort of 30 to 35 hours. I mean, it's actually happening a bit here. So going back to the broader kind of thing, as I said, not everybody has got perhaps the right sort of personality or whatever it is to do what you've done and get out of the corporation and set off on your own. That's what I've done too. And so I've worked with my partner, Victoria, so we've done that. I don't think we've had proper jobs since 1997. I know

Susie Moore:

It's in your bio. I love it. Tom's last job, 1997.

Tom Hodgkinson:

But anyway, I can also see, I've got friends who they work for a big company. There's some advantages. She says, my friend Rebecca works for a big corporation in sort of communications. I don't actually understand what she does, but she said it's quite nice, it's well paid and they look after you. You've got good assistance, you've got some expenses, you've got a nice office and all this sort of thing. So that's also fine. But I do think, so from when we started this and when I read the book and on, is this something that you have to work out individually or for yourself and just quit, quit and ignore the politicians? Or is there also a campaign to be done in general, like a sort of labor campaign, antiaz Amazon campaign or whatever it is, trade unions. And I also believe in that at the same time, so that we'd like to encourage some people to take the step if they want to quit their job.

And I think the magazine and the books do help people to take that final step. Sometimes it might've been something else they would've found to help 'em to do that. But also I'm following the four day week campaign here, you said about being ahead of the times. I mean, we've been writing about the four day week and the Eiff for decades. And I dunno whether it's come to the States yet, but there's been a lot of talk about it. And there've been a friend of mine who's a professor at Cambridge is running really serious trials of like 70,000 people and things like this. Big companies are doing it. Banks are going down to a four day week. And generally they say it's great. The Tory politician is the right wing here. Say, well, this is absolutely disgraceful. What are they going to do? Everything closed on Friday, and what are they going to do with all this free time?

They're going to sit around watching pornography. They actually, people, that's what they do, say that they should be told to work and work is very important. So there's a kind of political thing going on. Of course, the people who own all the shares, who own all the companies want to promote a work ethic because they make lots of money out of it by doing nothing themselves sitting around. So it tends to be the factory owners, bosses, big shareholders and everything who are promoting the work ethic. But anyway, there's this four day week campaign that's come in. I think it's got a lot of potential. And Bertford, Russell was talking about it in the thirties. John Maynard Keynes, who was the great economist, he was talking about a shorter working week. That's very, very sensible. It's very achievable. It doesn't have to be instant. It can go from 40 to 35 hours and then to 34, gradual in early 19th century, the working week, there was an act that came in, I think in 19 47, 10 years after Victoria came to the throne, an act.

And they had real problems getting this through. It was nicknamed the 10 Hours Act. It was called the Factory Act or something. What it was asking. I mean, how soft is this? It was asking that the working week reduced be made a maximum of 60 hours for women and children under 12. That was the first step. So in other words, children were working, children under 12 were working more than 60 hours a week in factories. And it took them 15 years to get that through because the tos were going, no, no, ridiculous. We'll lose all our money. The children love working. They love working in the factories every day on a hand loom and getting their hands chopped top and so on and so forth. And so for me, as the years go by, that was the worst period probably for work, was the first half of the 19th century.

I mean, it got really, really mad. There was no controls and the new machinery, the new industrial revolution, at the same time, it was being promoted by the Calvinist, the Protestants, wise America. Wise America in a way, the home with the work ethic. Well, it's a very successful country. So yeah, the work ethic does work from some perspectives. But historically speaking, as you know, it was because we had a Puritan Protestant revolution here in the uk. They tried to ban all our fun, like Christmas maples, feast days and holidays and things in this sort of quite brutal work ethic in its place. And they were doing quite well. But then it all went backwards because Cromwell, after Cromwell, the king came back on the throne. And roughly speaking, I mean, there'll be historians out there, he'll correct me, but very roughly speaking, it was the Puritans.

He felt that we'd gone backwards in this country. We'd gone backwards to medieval Christianity to Catholicism, and they wanted to have the chance to get away from this old fashioned system, hence sailing to New York, the Puritans in Boston, the Mayflower, and so on and so forth. And that work ethic is kind of at the basis of American culture. And you can argue it's been successful. I mean, Americans actually have an incredibly high average wage, much higher than the uk, almost double the ones with jobs. But also at the same time, it's a fairly brutal country, isn't it? I mean, I was in Manhattan and Brooklyn in March. The poverty is unbelievable. A lot of people are sort of left out of the system. Look at the homeless people on the streets in San Francisco, Venice, beach cities across America. It's weird, weird, weird homeless encampments and things that are springing up. So it's those two things. All my visits to America have been wonderful because the people are so courteous and warm. But there's also this quite brutal, like you said, two weeks, a year, two weeks off work if that. And it's

Susie Moore:

Even worse. I

Tom Hodgkinson:

It's even weird combination.

Susie Moore:

Yeah, I think it's even worse now too, because a lot of people are working from home, like the pandemic created for us. And a lot of people aren't going back to offices or they are part-time. So there's no actual boundary either. It's like your laptop that's on your kitchen table, or that if you do have a home office or whatever it may be, we don't have any boundaries. And I feel as if when I read this book or reread this book, which I love to do, you can see I've got highlights here, some of my favorite sayings from you. I just feel like I come back to myself. It is very permission giving for me because sometimes I feel a bit shamed, Tom, maybe it's just something my own feeling, but it's, Hey, what you up to? I'm like, I'm lying down. But also think about this, Tom, my best ideas, and if you want to just put this in a monetary sense, it can be a 20 minute conversation on the phone with somebody that can transform my year or something that I implement that takes maybe a couple of days of a lot of just momentum from me that can pay off for two years, three years.

So it's not the time allotted to the idea or the requirement of, and look, there is work involved, like you said, not to negate, to criticize, or to judge anyone who loves to work. I also love to work. It's my favorite thing, but it doesn't come from sitting and just hoping and just on my laptop crouched over. And we see too, there are so many studies now, so many books about how women especially are becoming sick because we are pleasing others. We are stepping in, we take on too much. We can't say no. And it's causing physical illness in our body. There's so much research about it. So when I come back to how to be idle, I'm like, I'm doing the right thing by my health, by taking care of having a rest and not pushing. And you know what, not attending everything that I'm invited to and frankly not saying yes to every opportunity just because I know I'll make money.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Yeah, that's great because that's really what I was trying to do. And by quoting really great thinkers on this subject who have been around forever, that's what I was trying to do. I was giving people sort of a license mean. I remember when I was writing it, I was like, I hope this book ends up in the hands of a sort 17-year-old, like a smart Alex, 17-year-old in an English class. And the H says something about hard work, and they go, well, actually, I think you'll find Nietzsche, sir, blah, blah, blah. So I wanted to give people actually a bit of intellectual stuff and some historical stuff to, as you say, back up this thing that it's actually, it's irresponsible in a way to be, not to work too hard. I mean, who are you helping? You are helping the boss. What about your partner and your children and your friends, and as you say, your own physical health, your own mental health and your soul. What's more important? Making a lot of money and working 90 hours a week, or I know people get a kick out of it. Fine.

I didn't know that that happening to men, to women. I mean, I knew that men literally, men die. They just fall down dead from heart attacks. Work is killing people all over the world. They have a division called the International Labor Organization, and they did a report. It is actually a serious issue because it's really a sort of fundamental thing about how you actually want to live your life. And also it's the fight against exploitation. So in the workplace, in the States and UK and all over the world, because the international labor organization, they do this research every few years, and they say that Ted Ross, the head of it, who was the head, so this is outrageous. Jobs are literally killing people. Jobs literally work, they said from their research, and this is not a kind of weird wacko conspiracy theory organization, it's the un kill 2 million people each year. And that's like war and terrorism drugs don't come anywhere near that. So

Susie Moore:

Overwork, overwork is doing this

Tom Hodgkinson:

From overwork and some of these industrial accidents or breathing in fumes, a tiredness in work. You think about all the miners around the world who's mining the stuff that goes in the phones, who's working in data centers where when you send a tweet, it's using up electricity and a gigantic kind of room full of computers with fans blowing on them. The data center is a huge, huge user of electricity in the world. We don't see it because you put something on YouTube, you don't realize that there's digging coal in the Arizona Desert in order to fuel a fan that's cooling down an enormous computer that's kind of in Delaware in a warehouse the size, several fields.

So, so that is an important issue, and I'm really glad that the UN puts these figures out. They don't seem to get reported very much. But yeah, it's heart attacks. It's mainly heart disease, I think, and sickness and illness that they can directly, and if you think they, and statistically that's going to be fairly tight actually, because they're not going to, that's where they've actually found evidence of a direct correlation between the work that you do and the fact that you died prematurely. That's the key thing. It's just premature deaths so younger than you would've naturally died and it's caused by your job. Well, I think about all the other people who just mildly depressed by it or even just mildly depressed. It must be a lot more than 2 million around the world. So yeah, I agree with there should be some sort of a revolution in work.

Susie Moore:

I agree. And I think to myself, Tom, there are some people who naturally have more agency. So if you work for yourself or if you have a bit more of a flexible career, I understand that's different if you have a boss who works with you in an office and there are times allotted. And in addition to that, I think we've got to take what we can get when we can get it. I mean, the way that I think about it is even if I'm in a very busy season of work, is it possible that one day I could still maybe cancel a couple of non-urgent meetings and just go for a walk and have lunch and be unhurried? And that's not possible all the time. But I've realized too over time that I'm the one stopping myself from doing a lot of things. It's me. I mean, I am able to do that probably more often than I even do. But I'm just in this, oh, well, that's lazy, that's wrong. That's letting people down. And I lean and I'm a huge fan of how to be idol. So I can imagine that most people, they never give themselves that permission. They are just trying to please everybody, tick the boxes, get it done, and onto the next day. And when you say your soul, your time, where's the time for even contemplation? We're just trying to make it through the week.

Tom Hodgkinson:

People did get it, and a lot of people still do get it from religious practice. So that did provide it for a lot of people, but also for a lot of people now, it's not such a thing. You mentioned the sabbatical, and then some days the shops were closed on Sundays once, it was a pretty miserable day for a lot of people, the visible Sabbath Sunday where you weren't allowed to play ball games and so on. But the churches and all religious places, the synagogues and the temples and the mosques or whatever, they did at least provide this other world, a different world.

I call it the utilitarian world versus the romantic world. So the utilitarian world, yes, we need to look after that. We need to have enough money, we need to work, and the practical things have to be done. But if you put too much into that, then other stuff gets neglected, doesn't it? So the what I'll call the things you've just been talking about, the sort of more romantic sides of life, and also going back to earlier point, yes, we do need to take responsibility for ourselves and our end decisions. We've chosen to do these things. I mean, an example I have in one book is people, people complain about their mortgage, don't they? Or about their job. And I sort of think, well, actually, you took that mortgage out. You knew how much you were going to be paying back per month. Oh God, I'd like to.

I got this massive mortgage. Well, I don't want to tell you what to do, but could you have lived in a slightly smaller house so your payments were slightly less and you didn't moan about your mortgage? So it is the funny thing that people take on these commitments and they then complain about them as if those commitments have been placed on them by an outside force. Oh, I'd love to come to take it off the offer. I just can't because blah, blah, blah. But actually when you look through it a lot of the time, as I said, there's a whole other side to this, which is about labor practices and management and how businesses are organized 3, 4, 5 day weeks and all that sort of thing. And office cultures, Elon Musk, he's not much of a help in this, is he like, well, I just work a hundred hours a week, why can't everyone else?

So I get, there's a lot of pressure coming from everywhere, social media, there's a lot of pressure from consumers and from other people. So it is hard to resist it, but you can take responsibility for yourself. And that's what they say in existentialist philosophy, Sarra, he was saying, well, you might not want to, but the sort of existentialist man, he said, it's something like this. I can't remember the exact quote, but he feels the sort of burden of the world on his shoulders. I'm saying his to mean his or her by the way or there. So people somehow, if you're a bit sort of awakened, and I think I just came back from a festival, we had a very nice writer called Lisa Miller talking. He's written the book about science and spirituality, and she said that spiritual people, spiritually tuned people are happier, healthier, and so on and so forth.

And it needs time to do that, doesn't it? Because you need to put a bit of time into yourself. It's not exactly me time in me time sounds a little bit like a bit sort of selfish. And that's another point is that when I was at my most, when I was doing the shortest working week, probably of my career, not really a career, but so far was when I was writing that book actually, and a couple of books that followed it. And I was thinking about four hours a day, and quite naturally, I got really involved with community stuff. I was on the village hall committee, we got involved in the local music festival and things like this. And there quite a lot of things that were completely pointless in a way, like just community stuff. No one's going to run any money out of it, but it was just done for its own sake. So I think that's another thing that, I mean, older people certainly find that, don't they? That when they have less work to do, they start naturally getting involved in community stuff. Space. There's space. Space, there's another benefits idling.

Susie Moore:

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to just randomly open the book at a couple of my favorite and just read out a couple of my favorite expressions and discuss them with you. How does that sound?

Tom Hodgkinson:

Fantastic. Thanks you so much.

Susie Moore:

I love it. Okay, let's see what we have here. Ah, skiving. That's an English word in America. We say playing hook skying

Tom Hodgkinson:

Is playing hook. That's it. I was trying to think what it was the other day. Yeah,

Susie Moore:

It's a strange expression. Playing hook skying say is a direct act of revolt against the arid philosophies of living that we're indoctrinated with at school and at work. The notion of suffering. Now, pleasure later, while this way of thinking is an anathema cure, he can't wait until tomorrow. He believes that the deferral of pleasure in the service of an imaginary future of stability is a bourgeois myth. Therefore, he decides to seize the day and takes off. Skyping is an expression of the individual or set against the oppressing machine. Skiving is living in the moment. It is freedom. It is at once a nose thumbed authority and a pleasure in itself. Can I tell you one time on a Monday I Insta story that I was at the movies and I'm like, it's one o'clock and there's no one here. This is the best time to come to the movies. And I was met with what? And I was like, I just decided to come here today. It's what I fan skyping. Let's say What's say you about Skyping now,

Tom Hodgkinson:

It's the best. I even feeling little that bit was really based on when I had full-time jobs. So skying is obviously a bit different when you don't have a job because you've got nothing to skive off from in a way. But I still think you can do it sometimes and quite enjoy it. I mean, I went through a slightly more puritanical phase where I thought, well, actually Skiving is, you could argue that Skiving is sort of irresponsible in a way because you've made an agreement with an employer. You might turn out to regret the agreement later. They also made the agreement with you, you're going to do this certain amount of hours. So if you sort of defraud them by Skyping off, maybe that's not responsible and you should just quit the job and do something else. I think that a little bit, but also I think if you are a freelance person, yeah, you can still enjoy a bit of a ski, go for a cycle ride at lunchtime, leave a bit earlier. Or we sometimes spend a day at home. Actually we have an office. The two of us go back and forth. It's a 20 minute bicycle ride from where we live. So sometimes we just end up staying at home. That's quite nice. Sometimes we come to the office. But yeah, I think you can, Scott Skiving could be a sign that you're not really enjoying your work, but if you really enjoy Skiving, then you can, and you're a freelancer. You could sort of do pretend skiving as you said.

Susie Moore:

Well, I also think too, sometimes the work that we need to do has different, it requires different periods of time and there are periods where we're just free. But instead of just maybe enjoying it or doing something a little different, we're just refreshing our email and of chipping away at work that really isn't due for a long time or these things can just happen. But sometimes the idea of something just spontaneous and fun, it's like with your kid and your parents are like, your mom's like, you're going to have to go to school today. We're just going to watch

Tom Hodgkinson:

Tv. Yeah. It's like David Bowie in Cos, isn't it? We'll throw it on the farm and take the car downtown if your homework gets you down and yeah. That's such a lovely feeling, isn't it? It's such a lovely song.

Susie Moore:

Lovely. It's better than Christmas.

Tom Hodgkinson:

It's better than Christmas. Yeah, Christmas is all planned. It's allowed. Yeah, just to do that occasionally. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's really good. Not too much. In the case of my children who wanted him go to school,

Susie Moore:

I know, don't anybody else do it, but a little here or there. I feel like it's good for the soul. Another thing you say here is about napping. You say The Napp has a deserved reputation for its spiritual benefits. The founders of Great World religions were dedicated nappers, and indeed it was during their roadside doses that their visions often came. The nap is sort of an easy version of meditation. Jesus was an idler. Buddha was definitely an idler. Naps can even be lifesaving.

Tom Hodgkinson:

Sorry, I'm laughing my own stuff. Very good. Very, very well thought.

Susie Moore:

That's very, very,

Tom Hodgkinson:

Who wrote that? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, it's true, isn't it? Because it's true also, particularly if you're going through very stressful period, going through a hardworking period, you need those naps even more. Victoria and I had a period when we made the mistake of opening a coffee shop and bookshop, which offered events in the evening. So in the evening we might have choir UK clearly classes, a history lesson, something, a book launch or a literary talk or a philosophical talk. So 2, 3, 4 times a week there was an event and the shop was open from 10 to six, but often from 10 till about nine or 10. Anyway. Wow. I went from four hour days to 14 hour days, like virtually overnight, and that was really tough and the naps were really lifesaving then. I dunno how I could have coped without the naps from Churchill.

I mentioned in the book, he said, I dunno how I could have coped with the pressures of the second World war if I hadn't had a proper sleeper every afternoon. He said he wasn't indulging himself, he was saying, you get two full working days per day if you have a nap. So there's a kind of a work ethic, key argument in favor of them as well. But I just also, I think it's so enjoyable, it's so luxurious after lunch just to lie on your back on a bed and just sort of drift off for 20 minutes. I mean, in the office, I just it design fault in idle office, no sofa. I dunno how we let that happen, but we have got a share with a high back and you can drift off and that's really nice. I sometimes do that in the office.

So yeah, I think naps are really important and they are at the foundation of some incredibly good ideas. And what was Newton or going for a walk? He wasn't having a nap, but Newton was going for a walk when the apple fell on his head. There were lots of examples. Einstein had a period of real laziness before he started working for three, four years. He just sort of drifted. He lived with his parents. They didn't know what he was going to do with his life. There were countless examples of this. They a nap, drifting off, daydreaming. These could lead to scientific breakthroughs, entrepreneurial breakthroughs, great ideas for moving civilization forward, creative ideas, notions of new things that have come together or just a good idea for what I'm going to cook or how I'm going to do the garden or anything. So they're really, really important. It's just so great that you use that nap room at the Huffington Place.

Susie Moore:

The only one,

Tom Hodgkinson:

Yeah. Is Ariana Huffington. I know she's done a lot about sleep, but she's also seems to me sort of not just ambitious, but ambitious beyond ordinary mortals dreams of what ambitious could be. She

Susie Moore:

Loves to create. Yeah, she loves to create. She cares a lot about creating content and connecting people. And I just think how wonderful too that she's leading the charge too or has for years now since our book Thrive Spoken about rest. And realistically, some people are single working parents, they have many moving parts of their lives. It's not always all these opportunities for breaks and rest aren't always available. So we take what we can get. And life has different seasons too. So maybe you're taking care of aging parents or young children and then that's a very busy season. So what can you get? It's going to be different to your retirement

Tom Hodgkinson:

Season. That's right. Grab the opportunity for Idleness when it presents itself.

Dear Life. It could be a train journey. Actually. There are all these little moments if you're sort of acute to them, train journeys, if you resist the temptation to take out your laptop. I mean, last weekends I went to a festival for two days. I mentioned this earlier, and normally I would put my laptop in my bag, but this time I thought, no, I'm just going to, why it's only two days I'll be back tomorrow evening. It's Saturday. I mean, I'm not that important really. So I didn't take it, but I noticed when I got back to the hotel room, it was more of a hostel. Actually, that's another story. Anyway, but when I got back to my room, I had this instinct to want to open the laptop, but what I did instead was read my book and drift off. And then in the morning I just had all this sort of time to think, because I would've done it in the morning.

I probably would've opened my laptop and checked my emails. Then the train journeys. Yeah, the train journeys were brilliant because I didn't have the laptop, my phone didn't work, I didn't have a smartphone, so I just looked out the window and read my book and that was lovely. And about three hours of it, heaven, heaven, no one noticed. And then on Sunday evening, I was like, I got home at sort of nine or 10, no, a little bit earlier. Anyway, whatever time it was, that's not the important thing. And I thought, well, I really better check my emails. And Victor, I said, why? I just check tomorrow? Don't bother about it. It just takes a day off. And I did check them later and I had about, actually none of them were at all urgent and took about five minutes, so I really didn't need to have taken my computer. I'm glad I didn't take it. Those emails were actually dealt with incredibly quickly. Basically just deleting 30 emails. I think there's one that was, you get so many spams and newsletters and whatever. So I just deleted them all and it only took 10 minutes. So yeah, so I'm glad I resisted the temptation to take the laptop on the train. And then I had this lovely idling time on the way back. I came back with my friend and another speaker at the festival and we talked all the way from Wales to Paddington Station. It was lovely.

Susie Moore:

Last weekend, it was Memorial Day here in the US so it was also Bang Holiday in the uk. I know. So I went to the beach to my husband. We had a lovely day reading at the beach. And then at 2:00 PM we came home and I turned off my phone until Sunday afternoon. And there is nothing that you are missing in a lot of cases,

Tom Hodgkinson:

You're just not,

Susie Moore:

Especially at a holiday weekend, maybe I'm missing out on some sales flash emails that I got for some retailers or something

Tom Hodgkinson:

Good. Exactly

Susie Moore:

Fine. And I just thought, wow, I may not have a complete freedom this week. Of course, I've got lots of fun commitments including this interview, right? But take what you can get. I mean, there is space and truly how to be idle. A Loafers Manifesto, what a book. It's actually going to be included on a roundup I'm doing of the best books, like the best books that you must read in your lifetime. So Tom, where can people go to find out about you to connect with you to consume more of your

Tom Hodgkinson:

Work? Thanks for asking these. We would normally say, just go to, we have a website called Idler id el.co.uk. And there's a lot of, well, I used to call journalism, but it's now called free content. There's a lot of stuff on there that gives you an idea about the vibe of what we do. We do online events. We have a lot of American visitors today, once a week on Thursdays during term time sort of thing. We invite a guest on, they talk about their book or their ideas and people really enjoyed it. We started in lockdown and people are like, thank you, because this is really keeping me sane. And we carried on doing them because they were such good fun to do. So that's one way of looking at it. Please join the newsletter again, that's free each Thursday. I sent out a little short observation or piece peace. I mentioned Rage Against the Dishwasher, a little bit of something I've been reflecting on that week and people seem to enjoy those. And again, that's free. So join the newsletter and have a look at the website and you'll be able to get a good idea of what we're all about. But Lisa, you've described what we're all about very, very well. And thank you so much for your cheerful vibes,

Susie Moore:

Tom. I'm so grateful that you exist and you do the work that you do. I think truly like we need it now more than we ever have, and a fan forever over here, Tom, truly. So check out Tom Hokinson, you got the fight? Yes. We'll, our own little rebellion right here. So until next time, my friends, so much love and ease.