At some point in the last decade, I realised that I no longer had any free time. I had plenty of time that was not spent working, but none of it was free. My walks were tracked. My reading was logged. My sleep was scored each morning by a ring on my finger, which informed me, with the cheerful sternness of a personal trainer, whether I had rested well enough. Even my leisure had acquired targets. I was not relaxing so much as performing relaxation, and failing to meet the quota.
I suspect this experience is widely shared. The logic of optimisation, once confined to factories and spreadsheets, has migrated into the most private corners of life. We are encouraged to maximise our mornings, hack our diets, monetise our hobbies and treat our friendships as networks. Every hour carries an implicit demand to be productive, improving or at least documented. The result, for many, is a peculiar exhaustion that no amount of rest seems to cure, because the rest itself has become another task.
Against this backdrop, a quiet counter-movement has emerged, loosely organised around the idea of deliberate idleness. It has its philosophers, drawing on a long tradition of praise for leisure that stretches back to antiquity, and its practitioners, who are rediscovering pleasures that serve no purpose at all. They are sitting in parks without headphones, taking walks without destinations and cultivating hobbies they have no intention of ever getting good at. They are, in a word, loafing, and they are doing it on principle.
The use of uselessness
The philosopher Anselm Thorvaldsen-Reyes, whose short book The Idle Hour became an unexpected bestseller in Scandinavia last year, argues that idleness is not the absence of activity but a distinct mode of being. When we are idle, he suggests, the mind is freed from goals and begins to wander, making connections it could never make under pressure. Many of the most important ideas in history, he notes, arrived not at the desk but in the bath, on the train or during an aimless walk.
Idleness is not wasted time. It is time that has been returned to its owner.
This is not simply a lifestyle trend. The new idleness carries a quiet political charge. To refuse optimisation is to refuse the idea that a person's value lies in their output, and to insist on the dignity of time that cannot be measured, sold or improved. It is no coincidence that the movement has found its most enthusiastic audience among younger workers, who have grown up in an economy that demands constant self-promotion and offers diminishing security in return.
There are, of course, limits. Idleness is easier for those who can afford it, and for many people doing nothing is not a philosophical choice but an impossibility. The movement risks becoming another luxury good, sold back to the stressed professional classes in the form of expensive retreats and beautifully designed notebooks for recording one's leisure. Its most thoughtful advocates are alert to this irony, and insist that true idleness costs nothing and requires no equipment whatsoever.
I have taken off the ring. I no longer know how well I slept, and I do not miss the information. On most evenings now, I sit by the window for half an hour with a cup of tea and do nothing in particular. Sometimes I watch the light change on the building opposite. Sometimes I think about my day, or my childhood, or nothing at all. It is, by any measurable standard, completely useless. It is also, I have come to believe, the best part of my day.
