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How idleness can dramatically increase output for creative types.
Maybe because it’s August, or maybe because I’m reporting a magazine piece around the idea, but these days I’m thinking a lot about idleness.
I come from its opposite. I come from a long line of farmers who lived the Protestant Work Ethic. They taught their children that life is labor and God’s grace comes through work you enjoy. “Be diligent in your callings and spend no time in idleness,” Richard Baxter wrote in A Christian Directory. “Perform your labors with a holy mind, to the glory of God, and in obedience of his commands.”
I can almost hear my Germanic forebears shouting in unison: “DAMN STRAIGHT.”
Secular modern life is like this, too. Suspicious of idles hours where we have nothing to do, wanting our pleasures to be purchased in rounds of golf or trips to the Caribbean because at least that way we have something to show for our downtime.
If you, like me, feel that you are never actually resting, well, you probably aren’t.
We live in an America today that works more hours than all other developed countries and has more stress-related illnesses than them too, that doesn’t take what few vacation days are on offer and that sees idleness as boredom and boredom as the worst…
