Tom Hodgkinson Quotes & Sayings

My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games. — Tom Hodgkinson

Whether you live in the city or in the country, creating time for a leisurely ramble is an easy thing to do. — Tom Hodgkinson

Take responsibility for our lives and recognize that we choose how we react to situations and that we can choose to be free if we so wish. — Tom Hodgkinson

The phrase 'work/life balance' encapsulates a depressing outlook. — Tom Hodgkinson

On bikeback, there is a delightful sense of self-direction and autonomy. Lately, I have taken to cycling slowly, more fun than the fast, competitive commuter cycling I used to do. No longer do I jump lights or attempt that irritating wobbling thing that semi-professional cyclists like to indulge in. — Tom Hodgkinson

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries. — Tom Hodgkinson

Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons. — Tom Hodgkinson

The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment. — Tom Hodgkinson

I've often said that far more sensible than a 'make poverty history' campaign would be a 'make wealth history' campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up. — Tom Hodgkinson

Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off? — Tom Hodgkinson

Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life. — Tom Hodgkinson

As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice. — Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure. — Tom Hodgkinson

A conclusion I've come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it's really about making work into something that isn't drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing. — Tom Hodgkinson

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside. — Tom Hodgkinson

There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time. — Tom Hodgkinson

You can become very serious as a parent. That's got to be fought against. — Tom Hodgkinson

Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week. — Tom Hodgkinson

Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden. — Tom Hodgkinson

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week. — Tom Hodgkinson

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure. — Tom Hodgkinson

Travelling fills me with dread. — Tom Hodgkinson

I like the idea of becoming [fairly] good at lots of things rather than very good at just one thing. So it would be nice to be okay at the guitar or at the piano, a reasonable cook, perhaps able to fix your car or do some basic carpentry, and be able to write the odd article. Rather than being super good at one tiny thing, to be kind of average at lots of things. It might mean that you have a more kind of enjoyable, complete life. — Tom Hodgkinson

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: 'What do you do?' is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality. — Tom Hodgkinson

Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient. — Tom Hodgkinson

It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are . — Tom Hodgkinson

Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking. — Tom Hodgkinson

Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun? — Tom Hodgkinson

Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens. — Tom Hodgkinson

The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness. — Tom Hodgkinson

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up. — Tom Hodgkinson

Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too. — Tom Hodgkinson

I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday. — Tom Hodgkinson

Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as 'employee satisfaction results' - might improve. — Tom Hodgkinson

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets. — Tom Hodgkinson

There is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there. — Tom Hodgkinson

There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m. — Tom Hodgkinson

How much better life would be if we began the day with a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy. — Tom Hodgkinson

If we are to make life into a pleasure rather than a struggle, then I would suggest that we have to start with our own mental attitudes. — Tom Hodgkinson

If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside. — Tom Hodgkinson

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions. — Tom Hodgkinson

In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten. — Tom Hodgkinson

I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder. — Tom Hodgkinson

Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue. — Tom Hodgkinson

Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We should resist it and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators. — Tom Hodgkinson

It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed. — Tom Hodgkinson

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on. — Tom Hodgkinson

The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today. — Tom Hodgkinson

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves — Tom Hodgkinson

Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with. — Tom Hodgkinson

We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level. — Tom Hodgkinson

Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society — Tom Hodgkinson

I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes. — Tom Hodgkinson

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about. — Tom Hodgkinson

For a really relaxing time, you want to go to a place where the work ethic hasn't taken hold, where the culture hasn't been taken over by the western values of constant striving. — Tom Hodgkinson

When we are busy at work and busy at home, an hour's walking every day becomes a real luxury. If done alone, the walk injects a period of meditation into the day, and if done in company, it allows space for some really good conversation. — Tom Hodgkinson

When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder. — Tom Hodgkinson

Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work. — Tom Hodgkinson

To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter. — Tom Hodgkinson

The terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office. — Tom Hodgkinson

I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks. — Tom Hodgkinson

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back. — Tom Hodgkinson

When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap. — Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in "An Apology for Idlers" (1885): "Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class. — Tom Hodgkinson

What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community. — Tom Hodgkinson

Career is just posh slavery. — Tom Hodgkinson

Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work? — Tom Hodgkinson

Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.. — Tom Hodgkinson

By taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the U.K. has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises. — Tom Hodgkinson

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside. — Tom Hodgkinson

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens. — Tom Hodgkinson

Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home - that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We're so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I'm speaking from experience; I'm not above all this. — Tom Hodgkinson

What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse. — Tom Hodgkinson

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own. — Tom Hodgkinson

In the West, we have become addicted to work. Americans now work the longest hours in the world. And the result is not health, wealth and wisdom, but rather a lot of anxiety, a lot of ill health and a lot of debt. — Tom Hodgkinson

We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment. — Tom Hodgkinson

I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism. — Tom Hodgkinson

We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives! — Tom Hodgkinson

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. — Tom Hodgkinson

It's easier to robe the poor. — Tom Hodgkinson

All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life. — Tom Hodgkinson

Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance. — Tom Hodgkinson

I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. — Tom Hodgkinson

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse. — Tom Hodgkinson

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler. — Tom Hodgkinson

After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. 'Rise and Shine!' he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portraied in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal. Kellogg himself, tellingly, was a puritanical health-nut who never had sex (he preferred enemas). Such are the architects of our daily life. — Tom Hodgkinson

Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion. — Tom Hodgkinson

The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, "I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams." — Tom Hodgkinson

Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap. — Tom Hodgkinson

Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked. — Tom Hodgkinson

Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need. — Tom Hodgkinson

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in. — Tom Hodgkinson

When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches. — Tom Hodgkinson

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions. — Tom Hodgkinson

Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale. — Tom Hodgkinson

I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days. — Tom Hodgkinson

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork? — Tom Hodgkinson

It seems no body's business to try to better things — Tom Hodgkinson

Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life. — Tom Hodgkinson