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Comment by dripdry45 | Hacker News Reader

I started with “How to Be Idle” by Hodgkinson about 20 years ago. Found “The importance of living “ by Lin yutang. I now have a small collection of books about idleness… yet here i am working and then throwing myself into working on a century house in my spare time… feeling starved for idleness. Yet my most creative ideas for it come when I’m idle.

Idleness led to Taoism, the pursuit of being useless. Led to Buddhism: just sit.

As the quote sort of goes: The great preponderance of society’s problems come from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room by themselves.

It’s a noble pursuit, idleness. Really. If you haven’t tried it, give it a real shake. A little more might fall out than you expect.

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These essays on idleness, along with the more radical ones against work in general (love Bob Black’s take on it), have been great comfort to my tired soul.

I will once again recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, especially The Burnout Society.

The older I get, the more pointless I find the modern goal of productivity. If there is one asymptotic goal one should rather pursue, is to do the most with the least bit of effort. And it all circles back to the teachings of the Tao. Be like water, not like the machine.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal

Translations vary slightly.

Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before.

It didn't help.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's *inability* to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal

Smart phones etc just prove that we can't sit quietly in a room alone.

> Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem.

No, they exacerbated the problem. The point of the quote is not the being alone, but the doing nothing. All your examples just made it harder to do so because there’s always something you can distract yourself with. The point is that you should be able to be alone with your thoughts and nothing else.

How is that quiet or alone? Stuff you listed is exactly the perfect enemy of what Pascal meant.

BP died in 1662 and that's a translation. The phrasing isn't quite timeless or perfect. The central point anyway is the ability to be without entertainment and possibly also focus. Not just people.

It's hard to escape the tick-tock of time slipping away, even if there's no clock in the room

You can microdose idleness. Be productive in general, but make time for doing nothing without guilt. I made it a habit to spend my first waking hour idle, and it feels great.

I prefer to microdose work.

Reading Lin as a teenager made me want to visit China, where I met my wife. Thanks Lin!

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