Pleasure-focused pastimes such as reading fiction are being sacrificed for productivity-boosting pursuits. Anna Moloney, in repose, defends idleness against the cult of self-betterment
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a long and important ritual of making pieces of sand art called mandalas, in which monks intricately and painstakingly assemble millions of grains of sand to form precise geometric designs memorised from Buddhist texts. The process can take several weeks to complete due to the intricacy of the patterns. Traditionally, even the sand itself is made by the monks, ground from calcite stones collected from the mountains and combined with coloured dyes.
Once the design is finished, after days or weeks of devotion, the mandala is destroyed in one swift sweep, representing the transitory nature of the material world; in other words, the whole process is a big waste of time.
I am no monk, but time-wasting is something I can vouch for and here, even in the productivity-driven west, I believe I have found my own type of mandala: reading books and never thinking about them again. This is a strange affliction, considering I am a bookish person, have two literary degrees, and even call myself the books editor of this fine magazine. And yet, for as long as I can remember, I have regularly suffered from such literary amnesia, where I can read a book, immensely enjoy it, and then immediately sweep all traces of it away from my mind as I shut the final page. Plot, characters, morals, mysteries, favourite quotes inhaled and then instantly forgotten. It is something I used to begrudge, and for a while was determined to amend by cataloguing every book I read and accompanying thought I had, but I have come to change my mind. Reading can be leisure at its purest – moment-driven, devoid of output – what some may simply call reading for pleasure.
But that is a dying pastime. As recently highlighted by the Reading Agency, more than a third of UK adults have given up the habit of reading for pleasure, while the number of adults who say they have never been regular readers has increased by 88 per cent in just the last 10 years. The usual suspects – a lack of time, the distraction of social media, dwindling attention spans – were all cited for the drop, but there was another concerning cause for the lack of motivation: put simply, a belief (and fear) that reading for pleasure was a waste of time. Indeed, of those who said they never read routinely for pleasure, almost half regularly chose to read the news instead, a finding the report called “consistent with the group’s motivations for reading – for specific information only”. These readers, it seems at least semantically right to diagnose, opt to read for pain.
Such utilitarianism may explain the rising tide of how-to books, titles which brandish their use-oriented credentials: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, How to Be a Citizen, How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, How to Make Sure You Are Never Wasting Your Precious Time on Earth Doing Anything For Nothing In Exchange. The problem is more pronounced among men – ‘straight men don’t read novels’ became popular online discourse this year – who, thanks to the industrious Victorians, have been conditioned to shudder at such frivolity. In the 19th century, reading novels was the “province of those whose time lacks market value,” according to literary critic Leah Price. Reading books about Fact, in contrast, could be justified as having a determinable return on the investment of time. The same holds true today not only in our choice of reading material – books about AI are currently top of the City’s reading list, according to a bookseller at Daunt Books Cheapside – but more widely in any use of our free time, which we seem to be increasingly determined to squeeze for tangible output.
Idleness has become suspect, and leisure stigmatised
Dr Daniel Glazer, a clinical psychologist, told me he was concerned that such “lack of unapologetic play” was fuelling increased anxiety, burnout and generalised restlessness, with hobbies having become “self-indulgent luxuries rather than healthy expressions of autonomy”. Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life, countless gurus may tell us, but it’s possible that filing your taxes for your passion project yoga course could reduce the relaxation. “The cult of hustling has people convinced every scrap of discretionary time must be monetized or tangibly ‘productive’. Idleness has become suspect, and leisure stigmatised,” he described, honing in on a critical issue: the dying art of idleness.
Its decline has been a long time coming. Almost a century ago, British philosopher Bertrand Russell mounted a valiant defence – his 1935 essay In Praise of Idleness in which he aimed “to induce good young men to do nothing” by extolling the virtues of laziness and leisure – but it failed to shift the dial. More recently, other campaigns have been launched: did you know that lying down on the sofa after work can reduce your blood pressure? Did you know daydreaming can sharpen creativity? Did you know that, done right, proper rest will make you more productive? Did you know that Russell himself, our supposed idling champion, was, quite frankly, embarrassingly industrious, writing more than 60 books and 2,000 articles during his lifetime?
So, I’m afraid I must refuse to contribute. Sloth hath no martyr: it is for the layabouts, the loungers, the thumb-twiddlers, the ne’er do wells.
Read this article once, rip it up, and join the ranks.