86Thousand400: Tim Ferris

Lazy: A Manifesto

Tim Kreider (Most recent book is 'We learn nothing' which Tim Ferriss loved so much that he reached out to Tim)

- If you live in American in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy busy". It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulations: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."

- This frantic, self congratulatory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction. Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum wage jobs they have to commute to by bus who need to tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence

- I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter. Tim once dated a woman that interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed...!

- Yes, I know we're all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cell phones stopping the spread of malaria or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels or making anything beautiful?

- When you try to meditate, your brain suddenly comes up with a list of a thousand urgent items you should be obsessing about rather than simply sit still. One of Tim's correspondents suggests that what we're all so afraid of is being left alone with ourselves

- For the first time in my life I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was "too busy" to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. Tim could see why people enjoyed that complaint: It makes you feel important, sought after, and put upon. It's also an unassailable excuse for declining boring invitations, shirking unwelcome projects, and avoiding human interaction. Except that Tim actually hated being busy. Every morning his inbox was full of emails asking him to do things he did not want to do or presenting him with problems that he had to solve. It got more and more intolerable, until finally he fled to the Undisclosed Location from which he's writing this

- Here is is unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email he has to drive to the library. He goes a week without seeing anyone he knows. He's remembered about buttercups, stink bugs, and the stars. He reads a lot. And he's finally getting some writing done for the first time in months

- He knows not everyone has an isolated cabin to flee to. But not having cable or the internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items

- Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is as indispensable to the brain as Vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do," write Thomas Pynchon in his essay on Sloth. Archimedes' "Eureka" in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzine ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that came in idle moments and dreams.

- "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C.Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pin ball games to write Childhood's End and think up communication satellites. Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work, giving each citizen a guaranteed pay check, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and 8 hour workdays. Tim knows how heretical it sounds in America, but there's really no reason we shouldn't regard drudgery as an evil to rid the world of if possible, like polio. It was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. Now that the old taskmaster is out of office, maybe we could all take a long smoke break

- When you're not drinking, you can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately the only advice I have to offer the Busy is as unwelcome as the advice you'd give the Drunk. I'm not suggesting everyone quit their jobs - just maybe take the rest of the day off. Go play some sport. Fuck in the middle of the afternoon. Take your daughter to the matinee. Tim's role in life is to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once to make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play

- Even though Tim's own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, he did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And he's always understood that the best investment of his limited time on earth is to spend it with the people he loves. I suppose it's possible that he'll lie on his deathbed regretting that he didn't work harder, write more, and say everything he had to say, but what he thinks is he'll really wish he could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last good hard laugh with Harold

- Life is too short to be busy