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

The sound in my headphones ceased to exist, but somehow that's when I truly heard everything. — Alexander Engel-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

Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do. — 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

If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work. — Tom Hodgkinson

The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need. — 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'm no stranger to murder. — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

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

Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing. — 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

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

So wait, shooting someone seventeen times isn't okay, but shooting him seventeen times with a fifteen-round magazine doesn't raise questions? — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

I'm starting to wonder if taking hostages was such a good idea. — Alexander Engel-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

I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me. — Tom Hodgkinson

Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen. — 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

The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free. — Tom Hodgkinson

I originally welcomed the mobile phone, as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom. — Tom Hodgkinson

In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything. — Tom Hodgkinson

I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic! — Tom Hodgkinson

Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness. — 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

No! Be weak! Give up! You can't do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to come and help you. — 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

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

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

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

Winston Churchill, who abhorred laziness in other people, himself took a nap every afternoon. He defended his afternoon doze in practical terms as an absolute necessity: You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one - well, at least one and a half, I'm sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities. — 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

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

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

It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up. — 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

Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans. — Tom Hodgkinson

The dress means no harm, after all. And it is new. It carries nothing inside it but the possible beginnings of her downfall. — Amanda Hodgkinson

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

It's gonna be a long day. — Alexander Engel-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

We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch is a time to forget about being sensible, practical, efficient. A proper lunch should be spiritually as well as physically nourishing. Cosy, convivial, a treat; lunch is for loafers. — Tom Hodgkinson

Jenny: Do you mind going back downstairs?

Damian: Why?

Jenny: Because I don't want any dead bodies in my bathroom.

Damian: ...We don't have to keep it in here.

Jenny: GET OUT! — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure. — 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

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities. — Tom Hodgkinson

We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures. — 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

When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else. — 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

The myth suggests to us that a "good job" will offer us ample money, a social life, status and work which we will find "rewarding." It's actually astonishing how little we pause to reflect on these terms when at school or college. — 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

Well, you know what I always say: 'overkill is better than underkill'! — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life. — 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

It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for staring into space for hours on end, I decided to put in some proper practice. — 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

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets. — Tom Hodgkinson

Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world. — 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

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. — Tom Hodgkinson

He'd imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it kept him going, that thought of peace. He'd believed in it like a season he knew it would arrive one day — Amanda 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

One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms? — 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

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

Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today. — Tom Hodgkinson

I would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace. — Tom Hodgkinson

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

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

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers. — Tom Hodgkinson

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since. — 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

Life is about recapturing lost freedoms.. — 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

Don't insult the hair. — Alexander Engel-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

It's pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing. — 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

It's been a long and trying day... but I'm still running with half a gallon of rage in my tank. — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

But, sadly, our manly struggle to conform to the slave-like work rhythms of present-day custom has led to the nap being replaced by that costly and damaging drink, coffee. As paracetamol is to the cold, so coffee is to the nap: a way of riding it out, a sort of competition with one's own body, a civil war. When we feel tired after lunch, the socially acceptable solution is to dose up on coffee and ride out the tiredness, rather than simply take a nap. The coffee may produce a temporary perking of the senses, but irritability will follow, not to mention a sleep debt later in the day. You cannot win the battle against sleep. Don't fight, surrender! — 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

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

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas. — Tom Hodgkinson