What could be bad about idleness?
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It's time to train people not to repeat the work of the past, but to create great things for the future. You see, this is a new concept where you work in factories all your life, and your children will work here, and your grandchildren will continue this tradition… Now you have to look at a car factory, which is fully automated, but the 4,000 to 5,000 people who work there are trained to operate these robotic arms.
– Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick
One in three Europeans say they might leave their jobs if American work culture continues to affect their companies. A survey of 1,000 workers in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK, published in Human Resources Director magazine, found that 86 percent of respondents believe that US corporate culture has a negative impact on their own organisations.
Nearly half (48 percent) said they would consider quitting if their “work-life balance” was disrupted by politicians from that country. Eight in 10, according to a human resources director, “worried that senior leaders in the Trump administration, like Elon Musk, would have a negative impact on the workplace culture in their country.”
People on the other side of the Atlantic are particularly concerned about whether they will lose their “right to disconnect.” I had to Google “right to disconnect” to figure out what that means. It means not having to constantly check their emails, for example, late at night and on weekends. I learned this while working on this article at 11pm on a Sunday.
I believe our European colleagues are right. Americans have come to believe that hard work is a virtue in itself. The Wall Street Journal reports that “world-beating executives and businessmen” now wake up at 4 a.m., so you can be sure that they will soon expect the same from their employees. In Josef Pieper’s 1952 book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he argued that during the post-war reconstruction, Europeans came to believe that until work was done, “the only thing that mattered was to keep one’s nerves on edge.” Americans follow this rule, too, and, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, we weren’t even bombed.
It’s in our nature. George Washington thought he’d done a great service by chopping down that cherry tree. When he was done, he filled out a time sheet and billed his father. Ben Franklin was wrong. Leisure is not “time to do useful things,” and on some level, he knew it. Franklin claimed to be “the laziest man in the world. I have invented all these things to avoid toil.” Thomas Jefferson, who avoided manual labor by having his slaves do it for him, believed that of all the “cancers of human happiness, none eats away at it so silently, yet so perniciously, as sloth.”
Pieper, frankly, was not an advocate of idleness. As the title suggests, he believed that cultivated leisure was essential to a healthy culture. But I am beginning to think that in our busy world we could do with a little more idleness.
I'll say more. In this country, laziness has never had the respect it deserves. “Idle hands” have gotten a bad rap. There are far worse things than watching the sunset with no ulterior motive. Or spending the whole day fishing without trying to “feed the family.”
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