What if we did nothing?

Parfois il est bon de prendre un peu de recul sur ce que l'on fait pour voir les choses de manière différente. Je ne résiste ainsi pas à la tentation de vous livrer quelques morceaux choisis faisant l'apologie de la paresse. Ils sont extraits de l'ouvrage de Michel Piquemal "Paroles de Paresse - Et si on ne faisait rien ?". Vous constaterez que certains de ces textes, même s'ils datent un peu, conservent encore tout leur sens aujourd'hui. La paresse est en effet sans aucun doute le meilleur antidote à la Rat Race.

Why should Work be a natural virtue and Laziness a vice? Why should we define ourselves only by our professional status? Who said that man was made to screw bolts, to classify files, or to type eternally on a computer keyboard? .... He is made to live ... and living includes both inspiration and expiration, action and non-action.

If laziness has become the supreme enemy in our civilization, it is because the individual who lazes around neither produces nor consumes. However, our market society no longer recognizes us as anything other than these two sad roles "producing and consuming", without which its balance is broken. According to the sacrosanct morality of consumption, leisure activities must also be active leisure activities. We must do DIY, paragliding, gardening, jogging or canyoning ... Doing and always doing, that is to say, buying and consuming. We believe we are active, we are activated ... Even the children of our modern society who never stop working: cramming from kindergarten for the wealthy in the West and slavery in mines and factories for countries modestly called "developing" ...

But by dint of being active and busy, we lose contact with essential realities. Idleness, which Thomas Hobbes called "the mother of philosophy", is a necessary time, an indispensable "letting go" that allows man to refocus. We must rediscover the delights of laziness, which is undoubtedly the best medicine against the feverish stress of modern life.

Michel Piquemal

Not to say a word all day, not to read the newspaper, not to listen to the radio, not to listen to gossip, to abandon oneself absolutely, completely to laziness, to be absolutely, completely indifferent to the fate of the world, is the most beautiful medicine one can administer to oneself.

Henry Miller

There is a time to go fishing and a time to dry the nets.

Chinese proverb

The essence of civilization is work, Work with a capital T, the new God. It is the worst invention, it is the great alienation of man, the perfect mystification.

The animal naturally does not work. Every animal, bird or fish, has its own domain, a patch of air, an acre of land, where it hunts and fishes by right. For millions of years, man has worked no more than the condor, the gazelle or the rhinoceros. It was an earthly paradise.

Joseph Delteil

A strange madness possesses the working classes of nations where capitalist civilization reigns. This madness drags in its wake individual and social miseries which have tortured sad humanity for centuries. This madness is the love of work, the moribund passion for work, pushed to the point of exhaustion of the vital forces of the individual and his offspring.
(...)
Our age is, it is said, the century of work; it is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.
(...)
If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and debases its nature, the working class rose up in its terrible force, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are only the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to work, which is only the right to misery, but to forge an iron law, forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the Earth, the old Earth, quivering with joy, would feel a new universe leaping within it...

Paul Lafargue

This is the story of a businessman who is on holiday in India. On the beach, he sees a fisherman who comes back with a fish. He admires his catch and says to him:
- It's happiness. Are you going back to get some?
I'm going with you. You have to explain to me how you fish.
- Go back and get some! ... but for what purpose? asks the fisherman.
- But because you will have more, the businessman replies.
- But for what purpose?
- Because when you have more, you will sell some more.
- But for what purpose?
- Because when you sell it, you will have money.
- But for what purpose?
- Because you can buy yourself a small boat.
- But for what purpose?
- Well, with your little boat, you can get more fish.
- But for what purpose?
- Well, you can take workers.
- But for what purpose?
- They will work with you.
- But for what purpose?
- You will become rich.
- But for what purpose?
- You can rest.
The fisherman then said to him:
- But that's what I'm going to do right away.

Abbot Pierre

What time should I get up?

Nasr Eddin does not usually get up early in the morning, hence the endless discussions with his wife about who will take the donkey out of the stable.

His neighbors, on the other hand, all peasants, jump out of bed at cockcrow, and they do not look favorably on these lazy ways.

So one day, one of them went to his field at the hour when the sun was just breaking through the horizon, and found a gold coin on his way. In the evening, very happy, he came to tell his good fortune to Nasr Eddin:

- Look how lucky it was to get up early in the morning! When I think that there are some who are lazy in bed... If I had come later, I would never have found this coin: someone else would have picked it up before me.

- But who tells you, objects the Hodja, that she was not already there last night?

- If she had been there, I would have seen her when I came back yesterday.

Besides, that is not the question.

- O headless walker! The whole question is there, on the contrary: the one who had the misfortune to lose it had therefore gotten up even earlier than you!

Nasr Eddin Hodja