In Defense of Idleness

 

Fur. Small feet. Watershed. Virginia Woolf. Toads. Seeds. John Maynard Keynes. Idleness and approximate synonyms. Greek poets. Japanese monks. Morality. Anarchy. Anti-tyranny. Spring weeds. Golden kites. Cicero. Illegibility. Incommensurability. Time. Other nations.

 
At first, it was a tuft or two of black fur tucked in the corner. Maybe it had drifted there, I told myself, shed by my Labrador retriever in his seasonal molt. It was a warm spring, a little windy. The days were growing longer, buds on the shrub birch and willow emerging in the warmer weather. I swept out the watershed and closed the doors. That night, I ignored the scurrying noises, the sound of small feet through the screened-in window not quite drowned out by the creek’s steady murmur. Outdoors was fine, that was where small animals belonged, I mused sleepily. They fed the owls, the lynx, sometimes the wolves. In the morning, though, when I went to get milk for my coffee from the fridge, the clusters of fur were back—this time interspersed with tiny pieces of chewed-up foam insulation.

The fridge takes up much of the lower level of “the watershed,” a four-foot-by-eight-foot stick-frame structure tacked onto the back of the roughly 200-square-foot, one-room log cabin where I live with my partner. The insulated top holds a small water tank open to the inside of the cabin, providing gravity-fed cold running water to our kitchen sink through a coil of hose. When the grey water drains out through a barrel buried in the ground, it filters through the rocky soil to the creek, which flows downstream into a glacial lake that feeds the Yukon River; over 3,000 kilometers from here, it pours into the Bering Sea. This boreal landscape of lodgepole pine and trembling aspen and spruce is tied by the sinuous thread of the river to the reindeer lichen and sphagnum moss in the wetland tundra of that distant coastline. We’re always connected to somewhere else; some places just remind us of that more vividly. Our cabin is about 15 kilometers or so outside a small town, on the unceded territory of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation in the northwest corner of British Columbia. As the raven flies, we’re closest to Juneau, Alaska, which is just over an icefield; by road, two hours from Whitehorse, the capital city of the Yukon. Mostly, we’re among mountains and trees and kind neighbors. We moved to the town while I was still a PhD student, a quiet spot from which to write a dissertation, and for my partner—a freelance writer—a book. We bought this cabin once I graduated and started a postdoctoral fellowship, my research focused on emerging energy debates in the Yukon. When I landed a professorial job in Toronto a few years later, I spent teaching terms in the city and the rest of my time back at the cabin. Until March 2020; when the pandemic hit, I returned westwards. A year of online teaching and then a sabbatical meant more than two years of full-time cabin life.

Our cabin is off the grid—that is, we’re not on power lines, there’s no plumbing. We have solar panels and batteries, a few LED lights, a propane stove for cooking, a wood stove for heat. The bottom of the watershed, fully enclosed with doors that open outside, holds the fridge. This is powered by our batteries in the summer, and in the winter we unplug the system and use it exclusively as a freezer, kept cold by the subarctic temperatures outside. The shed doors, in spite of our best efforts with wood and wire and spray-foam insulation, leave tiny gaps through which, it turns out, mice can squeeze their elastic bodies.

It was undeniable: mice had moved in. This nest they were building looked soft and warm, a mess of dog fur and foam. I could see they were dedicated to their new home-in-progress. A weeks-long standoff ensued: I would dismantle the nest and clean the corner; the mice, undaunted, would rebuild. A battle of wills—a battle of work. Eventually, my partner pointed out the fire risk posed by the mice given the exposed power cord of the fridge, and we resorted to traps.

Was it then? Was it later? Memory can be fickle. In any case, not long after my standoff with the mice, I picked up my battered copy of Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse. In it, Woolf writes of a house that “was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains,” having been abandoned by its occupants. The world turned, dispassionate, on the empty house. In previous readings, I had accepted the house as desolate, a corner of the world gone idle. The novel’s philosophical preoccupations are with perception, weaving in deft and unflinching studies of gender roles, of the strictures of social status, of life in upper-middle-class England in the first half of the 20th century, and I had focused on these, with the rest receding as backdrop. “It was too much for one woman, too much, too much,” Woolf wrote of the housekeeper’s efforts to restore rooms gone to ruin, to sweep out dust and decay.

But why was this building too much for one woman to maintain, let alone to recover from neglect? Was it just a big home, endless large rooms? I revisited that section on the ramshackle house by the sea: “The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed,” and later, “the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare.” Breakdown. Decay. Just as I remembered. I had long read Woolf’s domestic scene as one of decomposition and disrepair. We describe such ruin colloquially as going to seed. To “deteriorate in condition, strength, or efficiency,” as the dictionary tells us of this expression: something shabby or unkempt, evidence of a lack of care and effort. “Past one’s prime,” I’ve heard it described for people. Lives dispersed and now idle.

But then, as I reread Woolf’s account, idleness seemed to give way to something else: “Toads had nosed their way in.” Amphibian challenges: this seemed trickier for the housekeeper than rust, suddenly the rooms were less empty in this shell of a house. And next: “rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots.” Oh, I knew of rodents and their gnawing. I kept reading of other lives taking over, vivid accounts of thistles and poppies, swallow nests and artichokes. Things no longer seemed quite so steady and quiet. Then this exuberance: “Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-pane.” Burst from chrysalis! This was not the barren, desiccated house I recalled. The birds and the flowers had filled the spaces left by the absence of humans and their ceaseless cleaning.

We humans aren’t the only ones who try to make a home of a seaside house—or of a log cabin. Over the years, my partner and I have plugged cracks with steel wool and caulked windows and stuffed insulation into gaps to dissuade the forays of ants and wasps and, one year, insectivorous tundra shrews. Sometimes it was indeed too much for one woman, or even two. I had imagined the house in To the Lighthouse left unoccupied for many months, but as I removed yet another fluffy fur-and-foam bundle from the watershed, I realized it might have been days, maybe only hours. Gone to seed? I reconsidered the phrase. We learn so much about ourselves from our idioms. As a gardener friend of mine protested, this shouldn’t be an expression of disintegration; the seed phase, she reminded me, is a time of so much activity. Plants send out compressed packets filled with the energy and nutrients needed to sow new life—a beginning, a becoming. They aren’t following our instructions, of course: those seeds floating off into the air or falling to the ground don’t fit our commitments to orderly rows and efficient production. Poppies sowing themselves among dahlias, and carnations among cabbages: these are not under our control. A casting off of the goals and aims of humans, maybe, but certainly not done with the business of being and doing as they pour their energy into the future.

And so what if we reread these tales of abandoned houses and gardens not as idle and unproductive, but instead as shifts in occupancy? The absence of the activity of some beings—namely us, as is the case in the house in Woolf’s novel—makes space for the flourishing of others. Moths unfold elaborate dust-covered wings, molds erupt into extensive colonies. Any time I left the watershed alone, the mice saw their chance. When human activities pause, even temporarily, there is a fluid shift to a world of different labor: the exertions, replication, and activity of the other-than-human lives that are usually excluded from our built and settled spaces. What might these dynamics mean for different conceptions of work, then, and, centrally, for work’s absence?

When we consider work in our political debates, we tend, along with Woolf and her Bloomsbury counterparts—including economist and utopic hopeful John Maynard Keynes—to think in human terms: which people engage in what kinds of work, where and when and under what conditions? In 1930, Keynes offered a 15-hour work week as a route to a thriving economy and society; this was not so different from a plea made almost 50 years earlier by the revolutionary socialist Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, for a three-hour workday. Such debates are part of a response to industrialized life, and the exploitative conditions that accompanied its rise from the 19th century onwards. Technology in the modern world, suggested philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1932, so diminished the need for labor to achieve material gain that it was foolish to continue valorizing overwork. Reorganizing work forces, job guarantees, shortening working weeks, installing new technologies, and implementing a universal basic income are among the many proposed routes to a future of sustainable work. These discussions probe the distribution of labor, the motivations for work, the use of people’s time if they are freed from necessity. The conversations vary depending on one’s assumptions about human nature and ideas of progress: what forms of economic redistribution might enable the conditions of dignity for all, for instance, or what regulatory systems could rein in exploitation without crushing motivation, and what rewards are reasonable, and in which realms, for effort, intellect, innovation. In all these debates over the future of work, our attention is focused on how to direct and organize our efforts more efficiently, more effectively, more productively, and, sometimes, more equitably. We might turn to questions of the distribution of labor among and across peoples, where systems of inequality press certain bodies into certain forms and domains of work and overwork, for inadequate or absent recompense. These are pressing matters, of course: in a flurried and flustered world, the lines between waged work lives and home lives are blurred, there is unevenness and exploitation in the labor of caring for children and elders and the ill, and even creative and passionate pursuits are thrust into entrepreneurial gain. A pause or slowdown in work is needed, in such accounts, to make space for other endeavors.

But the environment, in these accounts, is so often just a backdrop. In these conversations, we tend to sidestep what we really mean by work, and what that work achieves. We evade consideration of the labor done by the myriad inhabitants of the world beyond humans, and especially the activities they undertake that seem not to benefit us. Going to seed, then, remains just an expression, instead of a recognition of the fundamental work of life unfolding. Further, we rarely spend time attending to what kinds of work should—or should not—be part of the future. What kinds of labor shouldn’t just be shunted to automated processes and machines, but should be abandoned completely? What should we value and valorize, and how should such efforts be rewarded? And while we pay some attention to the potential that shorter waged work weeks might enable for leisure and for self-realization—relaxation and socializing, say, or study and creative pursuits—rarely do we laud the reduction of work as the opening of space for undirected activity, or for the absence of human activity altogether. Maybe I need to stop sweeping out the watershed.

We tend to position work against a series of opposites. Some of these are lauded, or at least tolerated: leisure, play, meditation, contemplation, rest. But one of the antonyms of work is, in most accounts, something of more dubious value: idleness. Apathy and a lack of care; laziness and slothfulness and inaction; indolence and shiftlessness; sluggishness. The synonyms are plentiful, and they take us from stasis and immobility to slow, languorous movement, and from a distracted kind of absentmindedness to undirected activity with no set intentions. The expenditure of energy with no identifiable benefit, as in a car idling, or the dispersal of thought with no specific direction, as in idle daydreaming. In all these versions, idleness is something for upstanding citizens and responsible adults to studiously avoid.

Exhortations towards work as the path to truth, meaning, virtue, and salvation suggest the contemporary valuation of work is—although not universal—more than the legacy of a single cultural tradition. In the Greek poet Hesiod’s epic poem Works and Days, written in the eighth century BC, we learn that “When you work, you will be much better loved by the gods.” Even in the Garden of Eden, “where there was no neede of labour,” we are told by the English rector John Sakeld in the 1600s, “God would not have man idle.” It wasn’t a material imperative, but a spiritual one, something existential. This was not just a Judeo-Christian tradition: work was also “the Way” for seekers of enlightenment in Japan in the 1300s. As explained by the monk and poet Yoshida Kenkō, “it is a wicked thing to allow the smallest parcel of land to lie idle.” He listed the things that should be planted—food and medicine—as he recounted the teachings of a lay priest who chastised him for his unkempt garden, urging more productive uses of the land.

Some thinkers and writers have interrogated the meaning of work over time: it may seem self-evident to many, as historian Andrea Komlosy writes in her genealogy of the term, something we all intuitively understand. But “[u]pon closer inspection,…” she clarifies, “work proves to be quite the linguistic chameleon: everyone has their own, nuanced definitions, which themselves are in constant flux.” In her project, tracing a thousand years of changing understandings of work, she offers a sweeping definition that ranges from activities for survival to cultural expression to securing luxury and status, from subsistence to market exchange to the exertion of power. A wide-ranging term, then, that brings us beyond waged industrialized work. Komlosy’s project aligns with scholar Cara New Daggett’s extensive history of the changing meanings of energy, where she tracks how we arrive at contemporary perspectives that equate energy with fuel, and both with work. The widespread uptake of the science of thermodynamics, with its history in the Scottish Presbyterian world of Glasgow in the 1700s, drove a particular understanding of energy that took on social as well as pragmatic industrial significance, Daggett explains. There is a clarity of sorts in a vision that equates fuel with energy and work, and work with productivity, employment, and morality. Work is understood as the central tool to survive, to prevail, and to succeed in a world that tends to entropy and dissolution. With such a view, opting out of these equations is to reject progress itself, embracing a form of shiftlessness and even depravity.

But what to make, then, of this counsel from the writer Mark Slouka against filling our time with work:

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.

Slouka expands on this claim in a provocative essay, calling idleness “unconstrained” and “anarchic.” He suggests that idle time provides people with the chance to reflect on their values, beliefs, commitments to justice, and strategies for enacting change. Far from an embrace of sin or a dodge of responsibility, idleness is recast as a political project, and an unsettling one for those in power. “All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil,” Slouka writes, with indeterminacy at the core of his point. That fallow soil of our imagination, that undirected energy of our independent minds. At rest, yet restless; unoccupied, yet invigorated. Citizenship, for Slouka, especially a democratic version, requires time and unclaimed intellectual space in which each person can consider what they see as necessary for a flourishing society. Being constantly occupied, whether in waged labor or in commercialized forms of leisure, leaves no space to form our own values and views and ethical judgements, and so leaves us ill-equipped to contribute to a collective social and political life. Instead, we are too harried to mount any challenge to inequity, servility, creeping authoritarianism or even its fully fledged version. Idleness, then, might be a crucial emancipatory project.

A friend from the southern United States, with the self-proclaimed “deep anti-tyranny roots” befitting someone raised in Virginia, once gifted me the anarchist Emma Goldman’s three-volume autobiography. Goldman was born in Lithuania in 1869, then part of the Russian empire; she fled to the United States to escape the pogroms against Jewish people of the 1880s that followed the assassination of the czar. She became a garment factory worker in New York, and, soon after, a labor organizer and a staunch anarchist. Anarchy is an oft-maligned term, at least in its misinterpretations. It is regularly understood as chaos, as randomness, as carelessness or violence, as selfishness and self-interest and even nihilism. But these angles offer little insight into a political concept that, at its core, eschews hierarchy as its organizing principle. For Goldman, anarchism paired a fierce belief in the value of the individual with a hopeful account of collective harmony. There was no tension between these, in her account, “any more than there is between the heart and the lungs”—two essential elements of social life that allow for individuals to thrive. Although the language she uses of purity in her work may unsettle readers in the 21st century, given the legacy that such ideas carry, her writing was not in service of nationalism or a racial order. The path to harmony, she explained in her pamphlets, was to do away with religion, property, and government: a trio of problematic forces that dominate mind, body, and spirit.

What rules are meaningful and valuable; which ones perpetuate inequality? At what point do we substitute deference to authority for our own autonomous consideration—and what might emerge if we were to choose our own, distinct path? To hone our capacity for independent judgement, political scientist James Scott urges a daily practice of “anarchist calisthenics,” a form of small-scale rebellious actions that cut against the grain of authority; he envisions minor acts of law-breaking, in cases where this would not endanger others or undermine social well-being. Hierarchies that bring with them pogroms and violence, oppression and exploitation are not easily overturned: such recognition of the stability of unjust systems requires him to “confront the paradox of the contribution of lawbreaking and disruption to democratic political change;” law-breaking is needed to break the stranglehold of unjust rule. In Scott’s assessment, “Most of the great political reforms of the 19th and 20th centuries”—among which he describes those for racial equality and civil rights—“have been accompanied by massive episodes of civil disobedience, riot, lawbreaking, the disruption of public order, and, at the limit, civil war.” But in societies defined by hierarchy, how do we develop the skills for anything else? Scott advises carefully chosen confrontations with imposed laws to assert and practice independence and autonomy, without inflicting harm upon others.

Anarchism—or what scholar Marina Sitrin calls the “anarchist spirit,” noting the ideological diversity of anarchic ideas—can involve a vibrant social life, with fundamental operations that rely on collective care emerging without force and coercion. Far from a rejection of society and relationships and care, this understanding of social life suggests that order can arise not from following mandates set by higher authorities—monarchs and dictators, militaries and rulers, or even elected officials vested with enforceable powers—but instead from voluntary, cooperative agreement, continually renewed and renegotiated. Individual judgement is needed to enable this consensual collective. As socialist scholar and ever-hopeful activist David Graeber wrote, “one cannot know a radically better world is not possible,” and anarchism, at least in some forms, can offer a path to that reimagined world. Idleness as anarchic, then, suggests a kind of self-determination. Slouka proposes that undirected consciousness is crucial for being in community as a meaningful political citizen, an engaged social participant—and, perhaps, an engaged participant in the wider world.

In our definitions and debates, we tend to consider the work and the absence of work, or idleness, in human terms. When Kenkō, amidst essays on aesthetics and commentary on the lives of his compatriots in the 14th century, extols the virtues of a garden of “useful crops,” he fails to reflect on what else is growing in those untended beds. His idle land, among the “spring weeds,” likely hosted a thriving neighborhood of hardy wildflowers and mosses, shrubs and lichens, visited by all manner of insects and songbirds. His distaste for caterpillars is palpable in his writing, as they infest the late-blooming cherry trees. But how does he know that none of this is useful to the golden kites and giant crows circling above or to the roots of the wisteria and irises and five-needled pines that he so admires? We know so little of the needs of others. Beyond the human, self-determination describes the riot of life that erupted in Woolf’s imagined English drawing room, empty of human industriousness. In abdicating the conventions of a society that valorizes work above all else, the anarchy of human idleness leaves space for other relations to unfold. If idle time is needed to awaken our political selves, as Slouka suggests, it must be crucial to considering what citizenship might mean in a broader sense, beyond just a human context. The undirected attention that idleness allows can leave space for other relations, for other politics, for other ways of being.

Idleness has long unsettled powerful political figures, not least because of its temptations and pleasures. Historian Thomas Biggs writes of the tensions, during the wars of the third century BC of the Roman Empire and in the subsequent texts of Roman historians, between pastoral regions as places of necessary rest—part of military strategy—and as places of problematic escapism. Campania, an agricultural area in Southern Italy of what Pliny called “blissful and heavenly loveliness,” was not only a region of fertile production with its pastures and fields, but, according to Cicero, one of “indolent and slothful otium.” The Latin otium, akin to the Greek skhole, translates loosely to idleness, but context adds subtext, with the term varyingly evoking contemplation, a release from political life, virtuous human pleasure, freedom from practical activity, or, less virtuously, “leisure and retreat from public duty.” What the statesman Cicero and his contemporaries worried about were later described by historian Titus Livius as the “excessive pleasures of the region.” Abundance came too easily in Campania. The wine, the bathing springs, and the music of reed pipes might tempt Roman armies, and even their leaders, to abandon their military obligations. They undid discipline and moral character. Of course, in the accounts of these Roman writers, the labors of shepherds and musicians, wine-makers and farmers, and especially the fertile fields themselves, go unnoticed or at least unmentioned.

Mostly, the work of nonhuman entities—animal, plant, fungus, mineral, element—remains illegible to us. This is not for lack of effort: ecologists and physiologists and statisticians map territories and count offspring and track mates, overlay mealtimes and prey densities, measure brain activity and body fat and stomach enzymes. The result is ordered groups and categories of activity, confidently enumerated and named and labelled in terms of productivity. Least flycatchers engaged in aerial acrobatics to snag insects on the wing is sustenance, from this perspective, not entertainment. Wilson’s warblers hopping in the shrub birch branches, munching on little green inchworms, are engaged in functional foraging and not gustatory pleasure. The spruce grouse my black Lab flushes from the woods is fleeing for survival, not searching for solitude and hermetic peace. But are we really seeing these lives in their entirety? The porcupine trundling along the trail; the lynx with its unhurried paces along the road; the moose, when not browsing willow, not surveying for wolves, just standing in the brush looking out at the mountains?

When we think we understand the imperatives of the world, we constrain the possibilities for deeper understanding. Our interpretations of the actions of others reflect our own judgements; we observe what aligns with our expectations. When we hold this confidence, we act as though we can rule and organize the lives of those around us. What is lost in that certainty is both the autonomy of the lives of others and space for their self-determination—for their anarchy, in both idle and productive forms. Legibility, after all, is the condition for power. In James Scott’s critique of state-based versions of these impulses, he writes, “A legible society is one that can be controlled and manipulated.” This compulsion to gain control is not always destructive in intent. In a time of damage, it gives us a strategy for undoing the harm we’ve wrought: if we have more information about these ecological interactions and these multispecies systems, there is hope we can remake and repair them. Organizing our trade-offs accordingly, we fool ourselves that we can evade the costs of expansion, of growth, of the march, so to speak, towards progress, which is typically understood as technological complexity and the fulfillment of all imagined desires. And so we manipulate genes to bring back long-extinct species or to stave off invasive ones; we swap out one wetland for another, confident these exchanges preserve the ecosystem services we need; we offset one harmful activity through another positive one, planting some trees in atonement for cutting others, sure that we can sequester the same carbon, house the same species, maintain the same overarching balance.

We persist with this optimism about our own understanding even when we continually discover how little we know. For years, North American forest managers replanted trees on logged lands, clearing out underbrush to reduce competition with the new saplings. But these new plantations were fragile and stressed, exhibiting little of the resilience that characterized the forests that they replaced; only later, and reluctantly, did mainstream Western forest scientists consider that underground fungal networks link trees across species and ages, redistributing nutrients and sharing resources through linked root systems. This hoped-for equivalence of ecosystems, places, and lives is the logic both of contemporary restoration efforts and of mobile capital, a world governed by the fungibility of everything. One place exchanged for another; one tree planted for another felled; one stock sold for another purchased—the specifics of the materials can be blurred when the prices alone signal their worth. But as philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asserts, we need to recognize “the inestimable singularity of living beings and things.” Complex systems, as Scott reminds us, so often remain inscrutable from the outside—and in this irreducibility and incommensurability, political autonomy is possible. The integrity and complexity of the other beings with whom we share this planet remain beyond our grasp, beyond our control.

In my earlier readings of To the Lighthouse, I paid attention to the dissolution of order, and a portrayal of human industry battling against the ravages of time—Time, for Woolf, capitalized. It seemed human labor could only temporarily stave off the inevitability of loss and decay. There is a melancholy tone to the account of that house overtaken by poppies and thistles and swallows. But as I deconstructed yet another mouse nest in the watershed, I realized that Woolf herself recognized and celebrated the work undertaken by her nonhuman characters. “Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage,” she exhorted. Her writing signals a kind of triumph of that larger sweep of eternity. When human industry moves on, it leaves the anarchy of the spiders, beetles, flowers, the dust itself. The voices of the rest of the world—the “hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass”—can again be apprehended, and, after that, silence.

The seven essays of Going to Seed that follow this introduction challenge the easy categories of work and idleness, offering instead a circumambulating look at what ideas and ideals might be needed to imagine a radically different world of creation and repair, recovery and connection. “Grasshopper songs: On creativity” asks what Aesop’s insects might invite us to consider about art, possibility, and undirected time. “Bear pauses: On rest” questions the dichotomy between rest and production, and reflects on respite, renewal, and silence. From there, we push back: at the core of “Beaver blockades: On resistance” is the acknowledgement of contradictory orders and infrastructures. Some work undoes other work; this essay considers, too, the limits of human work in restoring our damaged world. Beyond full stops, and as another form of resistance, we might just slow down. Reflections on a less frenetic pace are at the core of “Fir deferrals: On slowness.” In exploring strategies of survival and the costs of convenience, it asks what must change in our hyperconnected industrialized life—and what work is offered by our nonhuman neighbors—to make other speeds possible. “Salmon migrations: On detours” takes us off track into unruliness, submerges us; here, we follow a set of diversions that never happened, finding our way upstream. “Willow roots: On restraint” circles back to the relationships between certainty and possibility, separation and connection, and how holding back can enrich us and the world around us. Still, surrounded by so much devastation and injustice, we might understandably despair; “Owl observations: On attention” offers reflections on tenderness and love in grieving, and in rebuilding out of the losses of the world. In the final chapter, “Rocky conclusions: On paradox,” we return to the inextricable entanglement of our lives with those of others and consider how sometimes we only know something in its dissolution; in it, too, we consider stillness and walking, and, finally, how idleness might be a form of responsibility, rather than delinquency.

In all these essays, am I trying to convince you, the reader, of something in particular about idleness and work and the great art of loafing about? The playwright Hanif Kureishi reminds me that “there should neither be footnotes nor much information in an essay; as a form, it is a meditation rather than an act of persuasion.” So, notes and sources aside (even with Kureishi’s advice, it’s a hard habit for an academic to break), this is what I strive for in these pages: a meditation, an act that itself occupies an unsteady place between work and idleness. Different from distraction and daydreaming, meditation is a concerted practice; yet, at the same time, the goal of it is a release from doing, striving, or reaching. It is an act of being, entirely and completely. In letting go of the self, we come to know it better; or perhaps the self is only illusory, and what we come to know is the world. In any case, on everything from speed and slowness and creation to restraint and abandon and grief, I have less to declare and more to consider, and little to impart but lots to question. Uncertainty abounds—as it should. The writer Stacey D’Erasmo observes, “Doubt is like a divining rod; it begins to tug when it nears something fertile and fluid and underground.” And perhaps that is the crux of the need for idleness: the chance to reflect, and wonder, and imagine; the space to relax our self-assurance and invite doubt.

This collection is not a “how-to” guide on slowing down. Leaning out, leaning back—these are not appropriate or ethical strategies in all cases. Reducing one’s individual work can be an excuse to offload responsibilities to others, at least for those wealthy enough to do so. This displacement of labor creates layers of planetary injustice, as we substitute various fuels and bodies for our own efforts, upholding energy- and materials-intensive ways of life through extraction from and of the lives and lands of others. This is not a call for self-care, or a simple admonition against (or urge for more!) technology, or a vehement manifesto against work. Labor can give us meaning, dignity, independence, connection. We can take care of others through our work, we can find our place in the world. But don’t mistake this for a clear defense of work, either, an instruction to find a mission, a purpose, a true calling through labor. The claim that you’ll never work a day in your life if your occupation is your vocation, as it is sometimes said, is in my view dangerous: a siren song of how to turn passion into profit. This can become a political strategy, as Graeber suggests, of underpaying workers by fostering resentment against those whose work is meaningful, whether care-workers and custodial staff or teachers and artists. It becomes justification for the poor compensation and precarious employment conditions for those in fields that might bring nonmonetary rewards. Work, that slippery term, is absolutely necessary—for us and by us—and we must reckon with what this means.

Work and idleness are neither as antonymous nor as dichotomous as they might at first glance seem. We are quite comfortable acknowledging the politics of work, even if debates rage about productive and reproductive work, forms of labor relations, supply chains and financial models and economic transitions. The interrogation of idleness must likewise be seen as a serious political undertaking, embedded in the study of work. We need to think about both what kinds of work and what kinds of suspensions of work are needed moving forward. More boldly, we must search for a more creative and expansive vocabulary that lets us imagine and articulate a radically different world. A less restrictive understanding of how we might spend our time. A more sweeping account of not only the activities of humans, our labor and our rest, but also of those around us, whose lives on this planet are so often shaped by our own. Through these meandering pieces, I ask, over again and in different ways, not “should we work or be idle,” but rather, what work is needed, when, by whom, for whom, and at whose expense. And in concert with these questions, I explore how some of us, at different moments, can pause, slow down, fall silent, refrain, and hold back to support a thriving, flourishing world.

In these essays, animals and plants—terrestrial and aquatic, avian and fungal, mobile and sessile, life beyond the human—are not just enlisted as metaphors and tools of writing and tricks of rhetoric. Although fables feature in these pages, they are not merely animal characters for human moralizing. These are other beings, worthy of our attention, of our greatest concern. For animals, as Henry Beston writes—and plants, too, I would add—“are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” The travail of the earth. The French travail means work, although the English etymology is darker, the Latin translating to something like instrument of torture. Whether torturous or not, the earth’s own work needs attention, and is often inhibited by our own. When human productivity is the cause of so much damage, why is it so often presented as a solution for salvaging the planet? What is sustainable work in and for a shared future? These questions have no straightforward answers. And so, this book of essays is my attempt to practice anarchist calisthenics, my effort at going to seed: a wandering, rambling, meandering look at the role—no, the vital urgency—for the idleness of some to enable the lives of others.