How to idle like a pro
Generation Z receive a lot of stick these days for lacking get-up-and-go. First, there’s their regrettable failure to step on the property ladder as a result of overindulging in avocado toast and bubble tea. More than that, the post-pandemic working-from-home cohort is routinely characterised in the press as skivers, procrastinators and idlers.
A whole tranche of employees was recently fired from Wells Fargo bank in the US because it was discovered they had been taking advantage of the firm’s ‘hybrid flexible working model’ – using ‘mouse jigglers’ to simulate activity on their computers while they spent the day AFK [away from keyboard]. A Bloomberg report, indeed, says that it’s not just Wells Fargo. The younger generation is slacking off so much that it’s costing US industry $1.9 trillion in ‘lost productivity’. Over here, The Times last month reported that more than 80 per cent of WFH staff admit they watch TV on the job. And it’s also reported that Gen Z and millennials have taken to calling Wednesday the new Friday – because since most of them WFH on Thursday and Friday they all go to the pub on Wednesday night.
‘Sam Leith? It’s Ferris Bueller. Any tips on old-school skiving?’
But who wants to spend their precious two days off – sorry, working from home – with the gnawing existential dread that a hangover brings you? Compounded, come to that, by the dim memories of having spent the evening talking about what members of your generation talk about in the pub – eg, the guilt-making environmental impact of avocado farming, the rising cost of bubble tea and the impossibility of ever getting on the property ladder.
The problem isn’t that the kids are idle, if you ask me. It’s that they are doing idling wrong. Their generation has been handed skiving opportunities that their forebears could only dream of. And they are squandering them.
What’s the point of ‘working from home’ if you spend your whole time scrolling nervously through TikTok? Or devising ways of avoiding your company’s surveillance software, and then sitting across the room watching the cursor jiggling pointlessly on your screen, fretting all the while that your boss has got ahead in the great tech arms race? And that whatever you’ve downloaded from Mousejiggle.com will be busted by some fiendish AI cop when he has downloaded from DetectMousejiggle.com?
At that point, you’d be much better off just going to work, where the idling possibilities are less stressful. In the days when I worked in an office, I used to be able to spend fully 40 per cent of my day sitting on the toilet with a newspaper, having a nap in the stationery cupboard or gossiping in the canteen coffee queue. The remaining 60 per cent of the day, obviously, was taken up by lunch. Back then, defeating the analogue equivalent of surveillance software meant keeping a spare jacket to hang over the back of your chair so that it looked like you were still in the office if someone checked.
The key, as I see it, to successful idling – the sort that fulfils and recharges the soul – is that it should be about ease rather than anxiety. Idling should be about revelling in wasting time. It should, dare I say it, be about becoming comfortable with a certain level of boredom. Is there any more delicious pleasure, for instance, than ignoring your emails and watching old episodes of Judge Judy or Cash in the Attic when you’re supposedly working from home? There is not.
Daytime television is a highly restorative form of meditation. But it needs to be done on a proper TV, ideally with adverts, and with your damn phone somewhere else. YouTube’s constant nudging algorithm, the ping of incoming notifications with their blossoming banners... This is the enemy of idling.
Daytime sex? For sure, if the chance presents itself – but the nap afterwards is the important bit. Failing that, try going into what gamers sometimes call the ‘big room’ – the one with a blue ceiling. Being outside really does allow you to feel the transgressive pleasure of not being in that migraineously strip-lit office.
The rhythm of a long walk is very conducive to relaxation – even if you insist on spoiling it by hitting a golf ball. And, yes, you probably can manage golf if you’re a bit ingenious and that’s your thing. A friend of mine who worked as a foreign correspondent in Beirut used to take calls from the news desk while on a Lebanese ski slope – and I don’t say he pretended the background schuss of passing skiers and wails of felled tots were the whistle of mortars and the cries of the wounded, but I don’t say he didn’t.
Cooking can be a form of idling, too, as long as you’re cooking the right sort of thing – nothing that splits, nothing that involves whisking or piping, nothing where you have to bring three or four different elements together at exactly the right time. I strongly recommend baking bread. As well as being enormously satisfying, and bread being much nicer to eat than most other things,
it is extremely easy. Even sourdough. The main thing is waiting. Give it a quick knead and shape. Leave it for as long as it takes to watch one episode of Judge Judy. Give it another quick knead and shape. Judge Judy. Knead. Judge Judy. Knead. Judge Judy. Knead. Judge Judy. Eventually, you bake it. Don’t bother with a timer: a standard loaf of bread takes two episodes of Judge Judy at 200C.
What all these things have in common on a fundamental level is that they don’t participate in the digital age. Proper idling is an analogue activity. In our workplaces and in our digital leisure alike, we are slaves to the algorithm: we are encouraged to feel anxious about what comes next so we get a reassuring dopamine hit when we find out – and then the anxiety is renewed.
‘Have you done this?’ work asks. ‘What about this? What’s after that?’
YouTube and TikTok and WhatsApp and Duolingo and all the games that live on your smartphone are basically doing the same thing. ‘Have you watched this? What about this? What’s after that?’ ‘Are you keeping up your streak?’ ‘Don’t forget your daily login bonus!’ They tell you that you’re at play, but really you’re just at another form of work.
The other thing that proper, analogue idling activities have is that they structure your time, just enough to register it passing but not so much as to feel like a chore. We know, after all, how difficult and panic-making it is to sit in a chair doing absolutely nothing. You need something to anchor you in the moment while your mind, blissfully empty, can roam. Now you’re really idling. And there need be not the slightest shame in it. As Kurt Vonnegut put it: ‘I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.’
