'How to be Idle' by Tom Hodgkinson

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Have a look at the Idler forum - it's full of retired rich bastards.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Hodgkinson addresses the 'It's all very well for you' accusations on the Idler forum:

Everyone has some gift or talent, it's a question of finding out what it is. Also, you can reskill yourself, get a new trade. There is that guy on Odd Jobs who is a classical musician who trained as a plasterer in order to make extra cash. Another friend of mine does the odd shift as a brickie, and gets £200 a day. Other friends do DJing or two or three labouring shfts a week. With a little imagination, you can easily create a more independent kind of life for yourself.

We set up the Idler with zero funds and while I admit that it has never made any money, it has led on to other things - in fact, it led to a full-time job for me for two years! I think the thing is to follow your dreams and trust that fortune favours the brave, which it undoubtedly does. With the idler I didn;t sit around moaning, I went on a course for dolies who want to set up their own business, and while the course itself was pretty crap, it gave me the time to get going. When I was really skint I supplemented my dole with Saturdays at the skateboarding shop for thrity quid a go. Look at Sarah Janes and her posts. She's doing all sorts of things, having quit working. You will suprise yourself.

It's also true that the less you work the more ideas you have for creative and money-making schemes. My friend Rosie leads this sort of life. She said the first step is to lose your fear of not having money. One of her mates gets on all these focus groups and makes an income out of that. Once peole know that you're an odd job person, available at short notice, then wiord gets round and you get offers. Another friend combines freelance book-keeping (very much in demand) with gardening and loafing. It can be done.

Anyway, we're looking at alternatives to full-time jobs, that is the purpose of the Idler. I hear the "money" argument and the "talent" argument a lot, and both are excuses to avoid taking the plunge.

You could easily get paid for your mental arithmetic and childlike drawings - it sounds like a good combination to me. The trick, as William Donaldson said, is to do what you like doing anyway but get paid for it.

Having said all that, what you lose when freelance is that wonderful amazing thing that you get in jobs... paid holidays! I will never forget the delicious feeling of lying on a beach whole getting paid for it. I don't take holidays now as we can't afford them. However, since I feel I'm on holiday all the time it don't matter.

[Ciarán2]

Argh there's too much there to be going at. I like his idea really, but context...CONTEXT! Goddammit!

How can you "lose your fear of not having money"? This does seem wanky to me, to be honest. I mean my rent is due tomorrow. You could rethink the role of money (as I've argued - tediously - here). But - gah - don't think I can be bothered at the moment...hey! I'm an idler!

[Oscar]

Thank you for posting that Lalla, I've just lost my job and needed a bit of a pep talk. When I'm not panicking I remind myself that the majority of interesting opportunities in my life have come when I'm unemployed and usually when I'm desperate.
I think when my life is cosy and fine I settle happily into a rut.
And Ciarán I've been homeless a few times in my life, I'm not saying it's great situation to be in, but it isn't a speedy drop into the abyss and like being jobless it has brought many good things in my life - when you are desperate you just look harder and you aren't afraid to take any opportunity.

[Ciarán2]

With The Idler, Hodgkinson targetted a market and did okay-ish. It provided him with employment, it's akin to setting up any small business. There were risks involved and luckily in this case, no houses were reclaimed by banks, no-one was left to go hungry. Fair enough.

But it cannot be a rule-of-thumb. You can be idle and unpaid for as long as your assets can carry you. If you are provided for in terms of food, housing and so on, great. That is, if you already have some kind of capital in reserve. But to assume that everyone can currently live in this way would be quite blinkered. And that appears to be what he's getting at, an I've done it so why can't you kind of mentality. It doesn't seem to take into account how he has been able to do it, what web of support props up this ability?

An alternative to full time work means part-time work or no work and the pay which that implies.

[Ciarán2]

And Ciarán I've been homeless a few times in my life, I'm not saying it's great situation to be in, but it isn't a speedy drop into the abyss and like being jobless it has brought many good things in my life - when you are desperate you just look harder and you aren't afraid to take any opportunity.

Ok, I appreciate that aspect of homelessness. Why should it come to that for someone to take stock of things? Is it the upside of homelessness that it makes you look harder for work? What about where there is no work? Oh it's a big issue I suppose, no pun intended.

[Oscar]

Ok, I appreciate that aspect of homelessness. Why should it come to that for someone to take stock of things? Is it the upside of homelessness that it makes you look harder for work? What about where there is no work? Oh it's a big issue I suppose, no pun intended.

It shouldn't take that, perhaps some people are able to take stock by just stopping and thinking about it over a cup of tea, fantastic, just for me, it doesn't work. I have a tendancy to go to extremes because that is where I find inspiration with my life. I suppose it's the "have to lose everything before you can acheive anything" idea.

You ask what if there is no work? When I am in this kind of situation, when I have discovered there is no work, then I start looking for solutions that aren't work. These decisions aren't easy, but they are possible and can cost almost nothing.

(although I'm not sure that they really involve being idle, hmm, so maybe they aren't relevant)

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

24. Free Spirit  (18/3/06)

The puritan work ethic has long been with us, but so have the means to subvert it. Free spirits are needed now more than ever, says Tom Hodgkinson

There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time. A favourite of these movements is the gloriously amoral Brethren of the Free Spirit.

The adepts of this heretical sect, active in medieval times, held that God was inside all of us and that therefore the truly free of spirit could do no wrong. Sin, they said, was a man-made concept. Adepts of the Free Spirit were free to give themselves up to lust and thievery, for, they said, "all is pure to the pure of heart". Guilt was out: "A man who has conscience is himself Devil and hell and purgatory." A very attractive approach to life, then.

In Cologne, Germany, adepts of the Free Spirit set up what became known as Houses of Voluntary Poverty. These were the artists' or anarchists' squats of their day, and contained a large group of these early bohemians, who survived by begging. They opposed private property and believed "all things should be held in common".

They would wander through the streets shouting "bread for God's sake". Thanks to the importance of charity to the medieval mind, it was easy to get by. The men followers were called Beghards and the women Beguines, giving us the word "beggar".

In the early 14th century, there were at least 2,000 Beguines in Cologne, or at least there were until the archbishop - who was, we suspect, a Daily Mail reader - had 50 of them burned at the stake or drowned in the Rhine in 1325.

The ideas resurfaced in England during the Civil War, when a sect that became known as the Ranters preached a similar message. Contemporary woodcuts show Ranters dancing naked or sitting at a table smoking, then as now an expression of freedom in the face of a moralistic government. Adultery for them was a sign of emancipation, and sex, they declared, was "the delight of Paradise".

Heavy drinkers all, they called themselves the "joviall Ranters" and declared that hedonism would lead to wisdom, and they would "drink sweet Wine and strong Tobacco, till we become immortal". Their hedonistic attitudes were all the more subversive for being expressed during the dark days of Puritanism.

As today we seem to have another anti-fun government, perhaps it's time for a rebirth of the Free Spirit?

[Clinton Morgan]

I think you'll like the latest issue of 'The Idler' Lalla.  An interview with Michael Palin and an article on Samuel Beckett. Have I bought it? At seven pounds you must be joking.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Bump

Extracts from Hodgkinson's new book in yesterdays' Guardian. I read these with the usual mixture of 'Yeah, he's right actually' to 'Oh fuck off, you smug tit'.

Stop the world, I want to get off

Ever get the feeling that modern life isn't really for you? Join the club, says Tom Hodgkinson. But if you're stuck in an office job that bores you senseless, drowning in debt and surrounded by labour-saving devices that take up too much time, there is a way out...

Banish anxiety: be carefree

When it comes to anxiety, I'm here to say, "It's not your fault." Shed that burden: the dreadful, gnawing sense that things are awry is the simple result of living in an anxious age, oppressed by Puritans, imprisoned by career, humiliated by bosses, attacked by banks, seduced by celebrity, bored by TV, forever hoping, fearing or regretting.

It - the Thing, the Man, the System, the Combine, the Construct, whatever we want to call the structures of power - wants you to be anxious. Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism - it's good for business.

The veritable stream of scare stories in the newspapers about rising crime makes us feel anxious. Governments love crime, too, because crime gives them a reason to exist - protection of the citizenry - and an excuse to control us. There is now a colossal machinery of state to deal with perhaps 50 hardcore criminals in the country, while the 60 million law-abiding citizens have to suffer. I am anti-crime, but not because I morally disapprove of law-breaking - in fact, I am attracted to criminals and the Asbo kids precisely because their criminality flags their refusal to submit to authority. Delinquency is a sign of life. I am against crime because it feeds straight into the government system: for every crime committed, there is a tenfold attack on personal liberties. One bomb leads to a thousand new laws. Therefore, the real anarchist should avoid criminal acts at all costs.

Some of us may actually find a sort of pleasure in anxiety. I recently sat next to a genial man in his 60s in the dining car of a train. He asked if I wanted to have a look at his Evening Standard. I said, no, that newspapers made me feel anxious by parading a load of problems that I am utterly powerless to do anything about. He replied, "Oh, I rather like feeling anxious. Then I have a drink!"

Break the bonds of boredom

Boredom was invented in 1760. That is the year, according to academic Lars Svendsen in his excellent study A Philosophy Of Boredom, that the word was first used in English. The other great invention of the time was the spinning jenny, which heralded the start of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, boredom arrives with the division of labour and the transformation of enjoyable autonomous work into tedious slave work. And we are very bored. Go into chat rooms and forums on the internet between three and five in the afternoon and you will find hundreds of posts from office workers reading, "Bored bored bored!" These pleas for help, these desperate entreaties from trapped spirits, are like messages in bottles, sent out into the oceans of cyberspace in the hope that someone out there may be able to do something to help. The odds, of course, are low.

What can we do to fight boredom? Well, the very same system that has created it also promises to relieve us of it. We are bored by work, and then advertising promises to take our boredom away once we have handed over our cash. This is called leisure and the word is derived from the Latin licere, meaning "to be permitted". Leisure, then, is what we are allowed to do in our "spare time". And it costs.

We have delegated the relief of boredom. We hand over our creativity to the professional musician or film-maker. We bore ourselves in order to earn the money that we will later spend trying to de-bore ourselves. That absurd modern trend called extreme sports springs to mind - in order to feel alive, because most of the year we feel dead, we hurl ourselves from a bridge every few months.

In Lipstick Traces, rock'n'roll critic Greil Marcus brilliantly relates the Dada movement to the Situationist movement, and both to punk. What they have in common is the rage against boredom, the desire, simply, to live. What all three movements share is the passionate belief that anyone can do it. We can all be creative and we can all be free. For myself, I urge you to take up the ukulele. This four-stringed marvel is very cheap, very portable and very easy to play. It is, therefore, even more punk than the guitar. Get a uke and you will never be bored again. You could even make some extra cash by busking.

The tyranny of bills and the freedom of simplicity

The already enormous cost of everyday life is increased when you are lazy, like me. There is a tax on being disorganised. Those of us who want to live free, live idle, live, have a tendency to ignore all the bills, parking tickets, tax demands, bank statements, mobile phone bills and the rest of the unutterably hideous flotsam of modern life. We stuff them in a drawer, we postpone payment, we delay and procrastinate. We have better things to do, such as blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.

Because of my tendency to neglect my financial affairs, I get stung with horrendous charges from the bank. The last couple of months, for example, have seen £300 deducted from my account for going over my overdraft limit, in some cases just for a day or two. And this is on top of its already punitive interest charges. Some deep, guilty part of me sees the charges as due punishment for my slackness. But then I read in the newspaper that my bank, HSBC, has just made an annual profit of nearly £10bn.

I once ran up nearly a thousand pounds' worth of fines because I was late in reapplying for a resident's permit, and it was only by going to a sort of tribunal, which I managed to sit through despite a crashing hangover, that I managed to get this fine reduced to £500.

When I was in the magistrates' court the other day, waiting for my hearing on a charge of driving without insurance, a young couple entered. The man opened the door to one of the courtrooms, shut it and then bellowed out to his girlfriend, "It's that old slag again." There is no sense of involvement in the process of justice: for most, it is simply a case of the busybodies in authority - the old slags - wagging their fingers at the reckless youth.

Needless to say, it doesn't work the other way around. We are powerless to impose fines on the companies that have served us if they foul up in some way, which they often do. It's a one-way contract, designed to benefit the big guy and rob the little guy. Stealing from the poor and powerless is easy. As John Ruskin puts it in Unto This Last, "The ordinary highwayman's... form of robbery - of the rich, because he is rich - does not appear so often to the old merchant's mind; probably because, being less profitable and more dangerous than the robbery of the poor, it is rarely practised by persons of discretion." Book-keeping should be part of every freedom-seeker's self-sufficient education. Gandhi, for example, kept his own affairs in order. It sounds extremely tedious, I know, but in his battles against the authorities and fights for freedom, he found it helpful to keep good accounts. Anyone can do simple things like writing down everything they have spent at the end of a day. The small act of taking responsibility for your bills by going back to the old-fashioned method of writing a cheque and putting it in the post produces a satisfying sense of being in control. Direct debits appeal to the tragic reality that we seem to prefer comfort to responsibility.

If you can't face getting organised, though, you could always get radically disorganised. The obvious way to be free of bills is to cancel the services the bills ask payment for. No Sky TV, no mobile phone, no internet, no car.

Cast off your watch

Nowadays, time and money, which the medievals tried so hard to keep separated, have come together into one thing. How did the change happen? Well, as in other areas, I am going to blame that dastardly toiler and moralist Benjamin Franklin, who invented or expressed an entirely new way of thinking about time in the 18th century. Time was no longer a gift from God, it was something else. The following passage was written as a piece of propaganda for young men starting out in the world: "Remember that time is money. He that can earn 10 shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Remember that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me the interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time."

For Franklin, it is not only a moral duty to consider time as money, but the accumulation of money for its own sake as a worthy goal. With this thinking, it makes a sort of commercial sense to wear a watch in order to keep a constant account of where all that precious time is going. But when you are constantly aware of the time, you are not living in the moment, because you are planning your next move. You lose that delicious sense of time doing its own thing, or "losing track of time", as the phrase goes.

Although it is undeniably rude to be late, I try to give as vague a time as possible - for example, "I should arrive between five and six." I am also starting to learn to allow myself oodles of time to get to my next destination, as any hold-up could happen on the way. And if you are early, then great. I remember from Joe Orton's diaries that he would always be early for appointments, and that this would give him the opportunity for a leisurely wander around before he knocked on the door. He was not afraid of spare time.

The sense of there not being enough time acts like a slave-driver at our heels, cracking a whip and telling us to get a move on. It is one of the triumphs of the capitalist project that the slave-driver is now inside us. Worse, we have been duped into spending our own money to buy a little slave-driver to go on our wrist. Throw it away.

Escape debt

Debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. Well, in my own experience, quitting your job is the only way to pay off that debt. The higher your wages, the bigger your debt. I have friends earning twice or 10 times as much as I do, but they are in debt because they spend so much money. If you live and work at home, then you don't spend in the same way.

Another strategy is not to care. Stop consuming and start creating. Grow some of your own vegetables and fruit; and bear in mind that genteel poverty, having enough for needs and the bare necessities but limiting yourself when it comes to wants and desires, is a laudable state.

We are complicit in the creation of the debt-and-money myth. Cease to believe in it and it will no longer have any power over us. You're very unlikely to be cast into the streets. One Idler reader became so worried about her debt that she went to her local Citizens' Advice Bureau. They arranged with her creditors for her to pay back the trifling sum of £2 a month. Eighteen months later, out of laziness, she stopped making the payments. Since then, two years have passed and she has not been hassled for the money. What an inspiring story!

Say no to guilt and free your spirit

In our heads we keep a sort of conscience account. Every pleasure has to be repaid with a goodly portion of guilt. For every act of the free spirit within, the chained spirit wags a finger and imposes a penance. But guilt is a disabling emotion, not an enabling one. It is negative; it holds us back. And if we are to believe Nietzsche, then guilt is the emotional counterpart to debt. When you are guilty, you feel you owe someone something. You feel you should suffer for your sins. But, insists Nietzsche, "To ask it again: to what extent can suffering balance debts or guilt?" What difference does it make? My suffering makes no difference to anyone else. It is completely pointless.

Guilt is on the side of authority rather than freedom. It is the boss within. The answer? Lower your standards! Take it easy! Embrace merriment! Accept disorder! The higher your moral standards, the greater the guilt. Remove all moral standards and you will become completely free.

No more housework

A certain aversion to housework - cleaning, washing up, doing the laundry, mopping floors, making beds - seems almost to be an innate characteristic of man, and certainly of the lazier among us.

In the capitalist system, the conventional way of dealing with the problem is to try to earn enough money to pay someone else to do it. Another solution promoted is to buy machines to do the work for us. But machines have their disadvantages. Consider the enormous effort that a dishwasher entails: it won't do the difficult things like porridge-covered saucepans or greasy oven trays, and then you have to rinse the plates, fill the thing up, buy all the pills and potions it needs, and then - horrors - empty it! Wash by hand and all these problems are avoided. There is pleasure in humble work.

DH Lawrence, in his essay Education Of The People, makes a powerful argument against the employment of cleaners and the like for those who wish to be free: "No man is free who depends on servants. Man can never be quite free. Indeed he doesn't want to be. But in his personal immediate life he can be vastly freer than he is. How? By doing things for himself. Once we wake the quick of personal pride, there is pleasure in performing our own personal service, every man sweeping his own room, making his own bed, washing his own dishes - or in proportion: just as the soldier does."

The only answer, therefore, and this is a difficult one to pull off, is to learn to love the washing-up. An odd paradox is that it is possible to find freedom in service - that is, in helping other people. Who is more free, the man with £1m and three servants or the man who serves him? Wooster or Jeeves?

In praise of melancholy

For guidance on the vexing issue of melancholy, depression, black bile, we must turn to the world expert, renowned scholarly reflector and gentle intellect Robert Burton who, in 1621, wrote that most cheerful and cheering of books, The Anatomy Of Melancholy.

That the book was a big hit should come as no surprise, because it came out during a miserable period in history. Merry England was dead or dying. Burton's book, 78 pages of the most delightful misery, was published roughly halfway between the Henrician Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, those two major disasters for lovers of life and liberty. The old religious festivals had been banned by Cranmer. Merry-making on Sundays was attacked. The fun was being drained from national life. The book is also almost contemporary with Shakespeare's study of isolation, Hamlet, and Marlowe's study of ambition, Dr Faustus.

The meat of Burton's book is thousands of quotations on the subject of melancholy from classical sources. This would suggest that the Ancient Romans and Greeks suffered from melancholy, too, which doesn't surprise me, because the Romans, particularly, lived in a rapacious, warlike, exploitative oligarchy, much like Britain and the US today. It may also be true that, aside from external factors, melancholy is just a fact of life. There is no escape. Even the wise, lucky and prosperous, Burton says, suffer from melancholy: deal with it.

Among the causes of melancholy, Burton lists bad diet. Among his solutions is merriment: "In my judgment none so present, none so powerful, none so apposite as a cup of strong drink, mirth, music, and merry company." He calls music "a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul". This is the power of jazz, or rock'n'roll, or dance music.

Today, gone are good company, good cheer and good beer as cures. Melancholy has been professionalised, commodified, industrialised. It has been transformed into a "condition" with a costly chemical cure. These pills make the most gigantic profits for their dealers, the drugs giants. Depression is big business.

No one ever suggests, of course, that the fault for your depression may lie not with you but with the things that you are expected to do in our hyper-competitive, meritocratic, money-based, godless society. However, rather than change yourself, you could change your world. Quitting your job, refusing to vote, not taking pharmaceutical drugs: these are acts not of apathy but of a radical re-engagement with society and with your own self. Once you disengage from the structures that bind you, you find that you begin to recreate a life of self-reliance. And self-reliance, rather than the sticking-plaster method, will help you to come to terms with your melancholy, rather than trying to banish it with drugs.

I think that even simply renaming depression "melancholy" can do a lot to disarm it. Keats, in his Ode On Melancholy, advises not getting wasted (which he calls Lethe) and not taking anti-depressants (which he calls wolfsbane and nightshade). Instead, he suggests going for a walk and gazing at the flowers and recognising that melancholy is a sister to joy and must be embraced.

Live mortgage-free; be a happy wanderer

People cite their mortgage as the prime reason for doing work they don't want to do. Clearly, the mortgage has become a symbol of repression. "I just need to pay off the mortgage, then I'll be free," they say.

Now, what is a mortgage? It is simply a very large debt that you take out in order to be able to live in a house or flat. The idea that we own this house is a myth - the bank owns it, while we pay the bank. Interest payments on the loan will total more than the actual loan by the end of the term.

The conventional wisdom is that you are supposed to take on the biggest mortgage you possibly can. I read of a nauseating Tory couple in Notting Hill who said that they "stretched every financial sinew" in order to buy their modest terraced house in fashionable west London. The idea behind that seems ridiculous: make your life a perpetual misery in order to pretend that you have enough money to live in a smart part of town. And because homeowners tend to sort out a mortgage that is just beyond what they can really afford, the wealthy make themselves poor.

Renting is, of course, the obvious alternative to taking out a mortgage. However, as a renter, you are subject to the unpredictable whims of market capitalism. This makes it hard to put down roots. If we had a system of longer leases, say 30 or 40 years, and lower rents, renting would be a fine alternative. It is not so much ownership that we want as a place where we can live without the fear of being thrown out at any moment; somewhere to plant fruit trees and grow vegetables; somewhere we can keep chickens.

A good role for the rich would be to let property to the rest of us at low rents and with long leases.

In the meantime, you might like to consider squatting. Squatting makes a lot of sense to the freedom-seeker. Squatters simply occupy empty buildings and live in them. They pay no rent and there are no mortgage payments to make, so one of the primary motivations for taking unpleasant work is eradicated, leading to a high level of freedom.

Another realistic option is communal living. Get together with a few friends and share a house. You could even buy a house together and share out the loan. Or join an existing commune. As students, many of us share houses, but when we grow up we come to decide that one of the benefits of wage slavery is our own little flat, perhaps shared with a partner, and escaping from the houseshare situation becomes a status issue. Think how well domesticated young adults might be able to live together.

Another option would be to buy a very cheap house in the middle of nowhere. You can always travel to the big city for trips and stay with friends. Then you will have a tiny mortgage. I would recommend taking a look at Permaculture Magazine, which is full of examples of people who have created low-cost living styles for themselves, sometimes building their own houses out deep in the woods. The problem they often encounter is planning law - for some crazy reason, planners will allow any number of wasteful supermarkets to clog up our cities, but if you try to get permission to build a log cabin in a wood, it is practically impossible. Clearly, the authorities cannot stand people who want to be free.

But the final answer to worrying about the mortgage is simply not to worry about it. It is a fiction. Don't let the debt get you down. Who cares about the debt? Are you ever going to be homeless and starving? Unlikely. So how bad can things get?

Stop worrying about your pension and get a life

Ignore the empty promises of state and business and make your own provision or, better still, create a life you won't want to retire from.

The artists among us should look to benevolent private individuals. Providing pensions of the old-fashioned sort - money for nothing - should be the role of monarchy and the aristocrats today. In the 18th century, there was a fashion for employing a hermit to live in a grotto in your garden. I should think that "hermit" would be a nice job for someone.

The pensions industry does its damnedest to instil fear about the future in us poor consumers. The simple fact is that you could die in a motor car accident tomorrow and all your pension-planning and careful saving would be lost. Therefore, the really responsible thing is to shout, "Stuff your pension," as Philip Larkin longed to have the courage to do in his famous poem, Toads.

I too am firmly of the "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die" school. Belief in pensions produces a kind of slavery. If you don't believe in pensions, then you believe in yourself and you believe in looking after yourself. This makes you free. The other point to make about pensions is that security itself is a phantasm. It simply doesn't exist. Things are unpredictable. Make your own provision. Continuing to work could be one. Owning a property could be another. Selling your house could be another. Another option is simply to give up and let God provide, and when I say "God", I mean friends, relatives and neighbours.

Reject waste; embrace thrift

It is your duty as a freedom-seeker to reject waste, because waste is a necessary part of the capitalist system. Think of the food that supermarkets and sandwich shops throw away each day. There is a new movement out there called Freeganism: this refers to the practice of finding all your food for free by raiding dustbins at the end of the day. It seems like an excellent scheme. Live in a squat, get your food for free. It's amazing what people throw away. Thrift allows you to escape the consumer culture and to replace working-earning-spending with creating.

It is not thrift as self-denial and the preaching of sobriety, industry, frugality and virtue to the lower orders that I am recommending; it is more a spirited reclaiming of one's own finances. And the thriftier you are, the less money you need, and the less money you need, the less paid work you will need to do. Therefore thrift equals idleness. Thrift is freedom from bosses, anxiety and debt.

Stop working, start living

Before the Reformation, England was one nonstop party. It really was merry. Ronald Hutton, author of a splendid book called The Rise And Fall Of Merry England, writes of the year-round festivities of the merry English. Christmas, for example, lasted a full 12 days, during which time you were not allowed to do any work. This was quickly followed, on February 2, by a holiday called Candlemas and then more merriment on St Valentine's Day on the 14th. Then came Shrovetide, which started on the seventh Sunday before Easter and lasted for three days. Easter lasted a full 10 days, then came the festival of Hocktide. There was just time for a bit of work. Then there was St George's Day on April 23, another day off. A week after that came May Day, of course, which marked the first day of two months of merry-making and sex in the woods. Then there was June 24, or Midsummer's Eve, and the feast of Corpus Christi. Then came St Peter's Eve on June 28, followed by Lammas on August 1, opening a season of summer fairs and harvest suppers. In November came Martinmas, followed by the fasting of Advent, and then it was back to Christmas again.

Compare that with the present working schedule. If you are thinking of quitting your job, then let me say I can highly recommend it. For one thing, it's a lot less work. An hour worked at home is equivalent to two in the wasteful office or factory. In the institutional workplace, we perfect the art of doing the smallest amount of work in the longest amount of time. At home, that process is reversed: we do as much work as possible in the smallest amount of time. So four hours' work at home is like a full day's work in the office.

You also find that, when jobless, you stop spending so much. Gone are the commuting costs, gone are the endless giant coffees. Free at last! Gone are the lunchtime sandwiches, gone are the drinks after work with co-workers. You don't even need so many clothes. Your costs plummet. That itself reduces the pressure to work.

A wonderful thing about being jobless is the fantastic sense of freedom and autonomy that you feel every day. I would rather earn £10,000 a year and be jobless than earn £500,000 and spend 10 hours a day as an employee. In my mind there's no contest.

Or go part-time. Working three days a week gives you a psychological advantage, because the number of days you have to yourself outnumbers the days you are selling to an employer. Reduce your hours of vassalage; reduce your service. Do less.

· This is an edited extract from How To Be Free, by Tom Hodgkinson, to be published by Hamish Hamilton on October 5 at £14.99.

[Ciarán2]

Extracts from Hodgkinson's new book in yesterdays' Guardian. I read these with the usual mixture of 'Yeah, he's right actually' to 'Oh fuck off, you smug tit'.

Which bits were which, ELW10?

I was talking to a pal today who said Noam Chomsky went out to his university one time and was giving a lecture on "freedom", and said "Do you want to know what freedom is? I'll show you." And he wrote a formula on the blackboard. simple as that. Stuff Kant, Mill, Sartre. Give Chomsky some chalk and he'll sort you out. (Unhelpfully, my friend can't remember what the formula was). Anyway today I was thinking about this...no, wait ! Come back!

How To Be Kind Of Idle, But Not Completely Irresponsibly So

by Ciarán (from the back of a beer mat, exclusive extracts for you here on CaB. RRP £free) 19.09.06

Little did I realise when I was on the doie how many better ways existed with which I could have used my time. Between 1995 and 1998 I became a bit of an expert on daytime telly - developing a borderline obsession with This Morning, Light Lunch and Countdown. I even thought there might be enough ideas about that form of TV swimming about in my head for me to turn it into a book. I had to find some kind of intellectual outlet after all. It turns out, that all of that time, rather than listening to Raj Passaud offer psychological advice to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder or watching Mel and Sue banter about the merits of Peter Purves, I could instead have become an expert on  Geography, Fine Arts or Literature. Or I could have learned Italian, Hebrew or Russian. What's more, I could have done it all for free! All it takes is a little application, a bus ticket, a fiver for lunch and the bottle to strike up conversations with strangers.

It's probably bleedin' obvious to most of you, but it didn't really ocurr to me until about three years ago that you don't have to be officially enrolled as a student at a university to partake of the lectures. You can literally just walk in off the street. It's not an officially sanctioned route to education or anything, and I'm sure there's a chance you'd be turfed out of a smaller lecture group. Nevertheless, it is more than possible. All you have to do is go along to your nearest university and decide on a subject you reckon you'd find interesting. There's nothing to stop you breezing into their departments and enquiring about reading lists and lecture times. Even if you make it plain that you are not officially a student at the university in question the secretarial staff and even some of the academics will be more than happy to help you. To help this along you could say that you are thinking of applying for university as a mature student and wanted to get a feel for university life, to see what kind of level of application was involved.

I'm considering applying to study a taught Masters in 20th Century Continental Philosophy at UCD next year. My academic background however is in Spanish and English Literature. As part of my English studies, I have read the works of the three main lecturers in Philosphy at UCD in some depth, and these very same texts are the official textbooks for the undergraduate philosophy courses.  So today I went along to UCD to "put feelers about" regarding the possibillity of even being considered as a potential Masters student. It was quite encouraging news really, so long as I manage a II.1 in English, chances are I'll be accepted. Anyway, while I was out there, I popped into the undergraduate secretary at the Philosphy department and explained my situation. I asked for a list of lectures and she delightedly printed off a timetable for courses from first to third year, with an outline of each course. So tomorrow at midday, I'll attend a lecture called "Introduction to Modern Philosophy". I'm just going in off the street with a friend of mine who is also interested, and I may approach the lecturer afterwards for a word about my interest in pursuing a Masters. (I also dropped into the Adult Education Centre to pick up their literature on Extra Mural courses which I hope to persuade my mother to attend - legitimately - in the next year or so.)

The point of this is, realistically, there is nothing to stop anyone going into that lecture tomorrow. Assuming there is adequate seating, obviously. If 20 or more people who were not registered students all descended upon the place it would cause a problem. But on an individual basis, there's nothing to stop any one of you trotting into your local university's lecture theatres to enjoy an hour on a subject of your choice. So long as it's not too obscure of course. You might be spotted if you attend a small seminar on Radiotherapy or something. There are many other benefits to this of course. Often univeristy campuses are enjoyable places to hang around. Some allow public access to their libraries. there are always large open seating areas, cafes and restaurants (really cheap ones, too!), and of course there's the student bar. Where better to listen in on conversations about Anchorman, The Raconteurs or the novels of H.P. Lovecraft? If you're feeling especially bolshy and you're young enough looking to fit in, you could make such a place or the sports centre a regualr haunt (providing student i.d. isn't necessary to gain access). In other words there is nothing really to stop a person on the dole enjoying all of the benefits of student life with none of the downside, no pressure or exams. And it's all free. Plus, you'd have the exciting awareness of the fact that you're kind-of breaking the law. You would have enough free time left over from all of this to continue job-hunting (or, perhaps, start job-hunting), and you might even mention your new found areas of interest  on your CV.

If you're on the dole and fancy an adventure this coming nine-month, there's nothing to stop you becoming a right cultural dilettante by spring. And it's all (kind-of) free of charge!