SUNDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2024

As a pensioner, I have a lot of free time. I need to teach online to top up my state pension, but sometimes there still seem to be so many hours in a day stretching shapelessly ahead. Despite being a lazy person, I feel a pressure to find something to do to fill those hours, to make them productive. Most of us have a sense of guilt when we goof off (this is one Americanism I really love because it captures perfectly the idle mindlessness which is the ideal of this activity). Once I have finished my teaching, I fill my time writing poems and maintaining this website and the inevitable struggles with WordPress that this entails, but this is not enough to keep me occupied until bedtime. So what else can I do?

One absolute no-no is cleaning my apartment. This only happens in extremis, when my fridge has begun to look as if it may be harbouring E coli, or the landlord is due to collect the rent. Alcohol is a good distraction for people like me who avoid overly strenuous physical activity – all those trips to the fridge for a refill, all that heavy lifting of the wineglass – but has obvious perils as a long-term solution. Filling those empty hours is a genuine quandary. Fortunately for us lesser individuals, the people who write self-help books feel they have the answer: permanently bettering ourselves as human beings. Only the stupid and the indolent, they tell us, ever stand still.

But not all activities, it seems, are equally meritorious. Doing things like learning a language or deepening our understanding of statistical analysis is apparently much more worthy than hanging around with friends in Starbucks or watching Netflix, but is this idea justified? Surely it comes down to personal choice and preference. For instance, I spend a lot of my free time doing laudable things like reading books because I’m the kind of person who enjoys this more than socialising and going to parties. But do we really need this hierarchy of activities? Aren’t the two ways of spending time just different? The self-help gurus might counter that my activities are more useful and progressive because they may help me to advance in life, whatever that means. But at my age who needs to advance and anyway I very much doubt this is true. A lot of free time activity is wasted if we do it as a route to personal progress. For example, I spend several hours each week working on new stuff to put on this website, but almost no one comes here and reads it. I haven’t progressed an inch.

The self-help gurus reflect a culture in which we are becoming obsessed with moving forward, both societally and personally. The biggest sin of all is standing still. In contrast, in the working-class England in which I grew up, most people were happy with a much simpler life: food on the table and a week’s holiday in Blackpool once a year to see the hallucinations. For a man, life meant a few nights down the pub, football every Saturday at 3pm, perhaps a touch of gardening, some kind of hobby to get away from the wife: the sort of life gently satirised by Ray Davies in his song, Autumn Almanac. For a woman, there wasn’t much free time once she had finished looking after the kids and cleaning the house and doing all the chores, but a trip to the hairdressers for a perm or a night at the bingo were enough to keep her spirits up. For both, there wasn’t this constant pressure to improve themselves and the idea that only losers were largely content with their lot.

Is the modern world in which there is this diktat to improve oneself really an advance? In many ways, I suppose so. Young people of my generation often rejected the rather staid culture that I’ve stereotyped rather unfairly here; we felt that life had to be more than just working to survive and we upbraided our parents for accepting this way of seeing the world. But the daily life that has emerged since then has huge drawbacks. In modern consumer capitalism people are units to be used and then discarded once they are burned out, to be replaced by the next unit of human labour. This obviously has a long history: Victorian mills and factories segue into the anti-human stopwatches of Taylorism, and then very neatly into a modern world where we are expected to work loads of unpaid overtime, pay for our own training, enjoy almost no job security, have to accept zero hour contracts where we take on the risk which in capitalist theory at least is borne by the employer, and so on. Nor is this restricted to countries which are nominally capitalist: modern China has the concept of 9-9-6, which means working from 9am to 9pm on six days of the week. The Victorian factory owner would be delighted at how history has turned out.

Even if we accept that this has all resulted in greater productivity, has it led to greater happiness? I very much doubt it. We certainly have more toys, but are we any better off when it comes to the real necessities, or simple pleasures, of life? The family in which I grew up is an example of what we have lost. We were a working-class family and yet we lived in a rented three-bedroomed house with a large garden. My parents weren’t in debt. We had food on the table and that annual holiday in Blackpool. Nowadays someone at a similar level in the social hierarchy as we were is much more likely to be squeezed into a tiny apartment, burdened by debt, and forced to do two or three jobs merely to stay afloat. Something has gone wrong, and it is the poor, and increasingly even the middle-class, who are paying the cost of our so-called progress. All the goodies go to the one per cent. Life has become a never-ending run on a hamster wheel and the vast majority of us can’t afford to get off.

It won’t surprise you after reading this that the slow movement appeals enormously to me, because although I may be psychologically incapable of just closing my eyes and doing nothing, I think there is a wisdom in doing it. In lots of ways I now think my generation were wrong and we have foolishly given up so much for what has effectively been a con, or at best a mirage. For the ordinary person struggling to make ends meet, goofing off simply isn’t possible anymore.