Nothing Doing
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 2, 2004
Lazy loafers or creative geniuses? Steve Dow says we all need downtime to reach our peak.
Layabouts, your time has come. Devotion to work at all costs is out of vogue and idleness is in. The long lunch is on, if you can drag yourselves out of bed to get there.A new popular movement is emerging - or should that be slouching - towards idleness. A growing group of thinkers wants to allay the guilt people feel about taking time out from the tyranny of society's moral persuasion that endless work is good for you.The 17th-century philosopher, Rene Descartes, might just as well have said "I lie here staring at the ceiling, therefore I am", such a poster boy for this laziness movement has he become. But if Descartes hadn't lain there dozing, he wouldn't have had time to think up his entire philosophical system, which initially came to him in a dream. For more than 10 years now, an English magazine, The Idler, has celebrated and survived on articles whose central proposition is that loafing is a tonic. Now, its editor, Tom Hodgkinson, who started the magazine in 1993 fresh from a stint on the dole, has amassed the anecdotal evidence that idleness is positively virtuous. His book, How to Be Idle, (Hamish Hamilton, $29.95) will be published here next month. It has been while daydreaming that artists, scientists and writers have come up with their brilliant ideas, says Hodgkinson. "So it's not really doing nothing. But then, what is? The only way to be literally idle is to be dead."Without time to dream, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would not have written Kubla Khan. Nor would Frankenstein have revealed himself to Mary Shelley. Paul McCartney would not have written Yesterday, and Einstein might not have had a crucial breakthrough in his theory of relativity.While there is a stigma attached to anyone who doesn't get up early, or appears to be just lounging around, the downtime allows ideas to grow in the grey matter - J. K. Rowling was gazing out of a train window when she dreamt up Harry Potter, the most successful children's book of all time.Working too hard wreaks havoc on blood pressure and a whole industry of cough elixirs and pills urges us to stop snivelling and return to work. Convalescence has become a pejorative term, like malingering. Yet being overworked makes us more susceptible to infections. Hodgkinson says governments and employers in the Western world fear the idle: idleness leads to thinking, and thinking might mean they lose control of their workers. The UN recently released figures showing 2 million people a year die of work-related causes. "So it's official," he says. "Work is bad for your health."An extra half-hour's doze in the morning improves your mental acuity for the day, asserts Hodgkinson. Certainly Descartes got away with this argument: when young and studying with the Jesuits, he was granted the privilege of getting up late because he was a genius.Sleep researchers call the half-awake state "hypnagogic": it's a time, for some, of visual and auditory hallucination - and hence creativity. Soon, more of us will have to be creative to make a living - and learning to unwind will play a big part.US regional development academic, Richard Florida, argues in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class (Pluto, $34.95), that 30 per cent of workers are part of a dominant creative class that will soon drive Western economies. Creativity takes work, but it also requires time to sit and dream, and seem like you're doing, well, bugger all. Writing a book, producing art, developing software, designing a marketing campaign or an investment strategy requires "long periods of intense concentration, punctuated by the need to relax, incubate ideas and recharge", says Florida. And we need to make the call on when we relax, as creativity can't always be switched on and off according to rosters.We need time to mull over ideas and to experience non-work mental stimulus. As the French chemist Louis Pasteur once put it, "Chance favours only the prepared mind." But the mind is ill-prepared if it is ground down too hard, without time to reflect and dream.
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald