To do: absolutely nothing

Finally! A perfectly reasonable rationale for my non-productive spurts. This essay is every guilt-prone procrastinator's dream come true.

"In an eloquent 2004 Harper's magazine essay, Columbia University professor Mark Slouka extols the virtues of idleness with an argument worthy of consideration by anyone concerned with getting things done. He writes:

Look about: The business of busi­ness is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term 'workaholic' has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We're moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well.

Suffocating our inner metaphorical feline isn't the only risk in a society that fetishizes productivity. Slouka goes on to assert that idleness is essential to a democracy:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due.

The eternally busy, he says, worship at the 'Church of Work'..."

Read the entire essay