(Also: an essay on the life and ideas of a 28 year-old, unemployed student)
Being 26 sucked for me. From June of 2023 to June of 2024, I suffered through the worst time of my life. Depression is an eerie disease, and still remains so for me. Even after so much has been researched and written about this mental illness, and even after having gone through it myself multiple times, there isn’t a convincing answer or definition toward depression – objective or subjective. “Oh, why are you limping?” “Nothing, I have a broken leg.” “What is that?” “It is when one or a few of the bones in your either foot get broken.” “Oh, I see. How does it feel?” “It is really painful. The area where I have covered hurts the most. It is this sheer physical pain that I have to take painkillers and eat certain bone-nourishing food so that the bone repairs itself.” “That sounds awful, but at least I am glad you know what to do, and you are doing it. Get well soon!” Such a nice conversation, isn’t it? Now, here’s another one.
“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you all week!” “I’ve been really depressed. I think I have depression.” “What is that?” “Well, it is an illness of the mind, or the brain, where you get super sad about life and yourself, and you don’t want to do things that you usually do, like eating, meeting your friends, doing sports, going on walks. You just lock yourself in a room because you are unable to face the world. But at the same time, you are also unable to live with yourself, since you are mentally sick, so you become anxious as well, and it keeps getting worse day by day. Nothing changes and you feel like shit all the time.” “Wow, that sounds really bad. I am so sorry. But why though? Why did it happen to you?” “I don’t know really. The more I think about it the more clueless I remain.” “That’s strange. So how do you get well? Should we maybe go to a picnic somewhere?” “Well, you can eat pills that regulate your mood or go to therapists to talk your situation through, but there’s no guaranteed way of getting well. And as for your offer, it is really kind of you, but no. I don’t think I can tolerate being out for that long, and with so many people.” “Oh okay, I just wanted to be helpful.” “I know, but you can’t help me unless you know how I feel, but even then, what can you say against the darkness that my life has become. It consumes all light before it can even exist.” “Uh, okay… well I hope you get well. I have to go now.”
The effects of depression are horrendous: an uneasy quietness, gloomy, always on edge, destructive outburst, lostness, continual and stubborn inaction, and so on. These behaviors can be observed by anyone about someone who is depressed. Yet the enigma remains: how the fuck did this happen to the person depressed? What did they do wrong? The causes of depression, however, are not that obvious and pointable. One’s tendency to get depressed might be genetical in cause, in that it was transferred from one’s parents who were also prone to mental illnesses from their own families. But there can be found clues of the causes from the general life as well. One’s inability to meet life’s challenges as one grows up to face them, which is usually because one is unprepared, rooted in one’s childhood and upbringing. Introverts, generally presumed, are more disposed to depression than extroverts, since they spend more time with themselves and their psyche, and depression is but an attack of one’s psyche. Or it could be a one-off event that causes one to go beyond grief and into the void land of depression: a death, a failure, a break-up, a loss, a forced change in life. Or joblessness.
Anyways, while my exposure to depression did have genetical roots, this particular depressive episode at the age of 26 could also be traced to external causes: mainly unemployment. I had graduated a year before, and had been jobless since. I hadn’t done any internships during my bachelors as well, and clearly I had failed to prepare myself for a career. I was utterly lost as to what to do next. I was 26 and I wasn’t earning any money, nor did I see any possible way toward a sustained inflow of cash. I felt and believed to be a total loser, a fuck-up; and as Kelly from ‘The Office’ says, I knew it for a fact because I had the evidence right there – my own life, unfolding before me. But, this horrifying fact of life only caused me to go into depression, yet once depressed, life became meaningless without it needing any reasons. In depression, life is utterly and fundamentally meaningless, period; you don’t need reasons to feel depressed once you are depressed. And so, my mental illness got a life of its own and just grew louder and crueler – wrapping my life like a vine wraps a tree, sipping out its life. Even still, this nagging and poisonous criticism always remained at the back of my mind, day in and day out: you don’t have a job, a direction, a proper activity – you are a loser. You are shit. ‘Aap to mar jao’ (you better die) as Dr. Gulati says on The Kapil Sharma Show.
After almost a year of misery and terror, I finally became un-depressed. Here’s what I wrote in my Lines collection: “You are always one meaningful activity away from depression and from recovery.” That ‘one activity’ was ACCA which I’ll touch upon in a while, but first I want to write about my other learnings. The chief reason for my being ‘a failure’, that I learned afterwards, was unpreparedness. I had been unprepared for what always came next: in high school I was unprepared for university; in university I was unprepared for a job; in my CSS attempt I was unprepared for the exams; and during my unemployed days, I was unprepared for facing criticism, of others and of my own. So why was I unprepared? Is a specific preparation, planning let’s say, needed to continue gracefully in life, or is the preparation of personality, character, the basis for a generally smooth life? If it is the former, then I had no plans. After high school, I had no idea what university is, or why should one continue with studies, or if one has to, then where and what should one study. During university, I planned nothing for internships, relevant skill development, or even a narrowing of my field of study for specialization and future career. After university, I had no roadmap for applying for jobs, which in itself is a skill (of knowing where to look, being vigilant, and being hopeful). And so, I failed, failed, and failed. As Nietzsche aptly pointed out that when one is weary, one is then attacked by itself – depression then arrived and strangled me out of life.
Preparation of character, on the other hand, is a more noble and liberating pursuit. If one looks at life as ‘a box of chocolate’, not knowing what comes next, then all planning is doomed. Life by its nature has the capacity of being unpredictable, both in the context of ‘fate’ and due to the interconnectedness of our modern world. While our daily routine is hardly disturbed for what seems like regular basis, it takes only one day, one event, one news, for things to turn upside down. And it’s only in times of sudden crisis that the strength of character shines, just as a star sportsman that performs in the final match against all odds. However, while planning tilts more toward science where knowledge, skill set, and decisions can get you far, character development is more of an art – and that too of a continual process. You can never claim that you have fully developed. There’s always another insight waiting for you in an unexpected turn of events; and in the tranquil times, there’s always room for carving further the aspects of character that matter most, like patience, resilience, attentiveness, keeping an eye on the horizon, forgiveness… hope.
If we talk about the development process of both these ‘preparations’, we find ourselves on different tracks. After I had decided, from only a few dauting prospects one of the dauting prospect, ACCA, I realized how forced I felt to decide a career where I should’ve chosen one instead. It then dawned on me how important planning is for an unhindered journey through the course of life. And here was my hypothesis for one. If one starts school at age of 5, by 15 or 16, one should be done with school with the basic literacy, basic awareness of life in general, and some introspection about oneself: likes dislikes, what attracts us, what we fear, what we desire, and so on. Next two years spent in high school should not only progress one’s studies but should also be spent in shaping our own desires and capabilities into a plan or sketch toward higher studies. At this age, one should be able to ‘speak’ (I can’t emphasize how important it is) and go to certain people and ask for guidance. At 18, one should then embark on one’s, not only desired but more importantly planned and analyzed, field of study and university. By 22, one should be graduated with a few internships, a know-how of specific job markets and their requirements, a humble confidence about oneself and skills acquired, and interactive connections with new friends, teachers, colleagues, and preferably a few people from relevant industries. What one does after that varies, but by mid-twenties one should by definition have landed, however lightly, a foot in one’s chosen career, how better with determination and good luck. Marry by then, if you love someone or else you’ll lose her to someone else, or if you wait till the ripe age of 30, how much better. By 30, if everything had worked out nicely, as it should have, one is firmly stable, ready to marry, start a family, and most importantly, hopeful and lively about the next 10 to 15 years of life.
I know I’m being naïve. There’s a German saying: man thinks, God laughs. Of course, life doesn’t go to our plans; our fates have something else planned for us after all. But I will say this before I move to my next point, that planning isn’t necessary or important to make successful plans that should actually work out in real life. In the process of planning, one should understand oneself and the situation around us, so that we aren’t met with shock or unpreparedness even if things work out against us.
A hypothesis for the latter kind of development, namely of character and personality, is comparatively harder to build. As I mentioned, it lies toward the artistic side, by which I mean it can be too subjective to build any sort of a one-size-fits-all argument. However, the crux here is this: be strong enough to be able to face the hardships and unpleasant surprises of life head on without being specifically prepared for it. I can recall many blunders since my high school that I committed because I wasn’t firm in my decisions for I lacked the character. I dismissed my inclination toward a degree in literature because it was a general consensus that it doesn’t pay – which did turn out to be true – but ten years on and with a firmer passion in literature and writing still, I do sometimes regret not taking that career path. Similarly, I avoided ACCA or CA, fearing I’d be too weakly intended to complete it all the way; I chose BBA and it proved to be one of the key damaging decisions in my life. I also ran away from a scholarship I was offered at a relatively prestigious university, because I couldn’t stand its shockingly hot weather since it was first time leaving home. The point is, had I been more resolved in my values and philosophy of life, I might have made different, more resulting decisions and would have by now, a different place in life.
But how does one build one’s character? Is there any one of singular and objective thing which can be pointed out? I haven’t really run my mind on this subject, although it has been a general musing for my thinking, but one particular thing comes to me for now – and that is struggle. I remember my uncle from my mother’s side mentioning this observation: that if you live by a flower, you’ll be soft; but if you live by a stone, you’ll be strong. Hardships are the starting point of any character development, and struggling is its process. The problem is, however, that all our efforts in life are directed toward making our lives more comfortable, struggle free that is. It is a very logical thing to be pursuing in life, yet the paradox is that the pursuit of a comfortable life, as well as its achievement, becomes the basis of a deadness, of lack of character, and drying of the livelihood. I can’t recall the twentieth century psychologist, but he gives us the insight that by persistently trying to make the lives of their children easier, parents end up making it even harder for them. That is because they’re ripping them, although with noble intention of kindness and love, of the necessary struggles they have to go through in order to be a successful adult and an overall human being. Hardships declare to us that life is inherently hard, or at least we’ve made is so, and that we need to upgrade ourselves in order to be able to live in a desirable manner. And for that, we have to struggle. While struggling, we muster and pick up on the essential immaterial resources for living a good life; it is through this ugly, often times breaking process which, if stood out, would help us become a literally better version of ourselves. These essential resources that we pick on the way, namely patience, resilience, hope, humility, and so on, then help us throughout our lives – the hardships and struggles change, but these resources only ripen by time. Once sufficiently acquired, the person then can confidently claim and see in his own life the advantages of having been through those hard times. Not that life gets any easier onwards, but that one can at least rest assured in one’s ability to survive, and how better, thrive even. Therefore early difficulties in life, be it loneliness, financial problems, general confusion, inability to meet what’s required of you, etc., is vital for a resolved adulthood later in life. Gladwell in his book ‘David and Goliath’ has a chapter titled ‘The Desired Difficulty’ where he explains how hardships can even be desired for the sake of growth. In the chapter’s epigraph, he has an excerpt from Corinthians books of the Bible where it says “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Perhaps, weakness is even the prerequisite for strength.
Hodgkinson’s anti-cultural book, however, avoids all together the essentialism of ‘the career narrative’ and all that comes attached with it. Early on in the book, he writes: “Why are we all so desperate for “jobs,” by the way? They’re horrible things.” Based on twenty chapters following the hours in a day, this book boldly champions the idler and the idle life. This genre of nonfiction books is very rarely mentioned, and one comes across only a few popular books that push against the flow of ‘normal’ life of today. I felt rather unprepared to mention this book to someone, knowing that he might judge me for being ‘lazy’, which ironically is what this book specifically promotes. However, Hodgkinson and other authors of this genre, don’t want to spoil an individual or a whole generation to the mundanity and destructiveness of ‘sloth nature’, but theirs is a noble mission – to rebel against the capitalism and the established job market, or the idea of careering. Just like the laborer of Russia rebelled against the harsh and cruel conditions of industrial work, so too should the modern man put a protest against the present day work-office life. However, ‘How to be Idle’ is by no means a provocative and revolution-promoting book like the works of Marx, it’s more directed toward the pleasures of avoiding the capitalist trap and how idleness can be a rewarding philosophy for living one’s, single and finite, life – well.
Starting at 8 am, the first chapter is ‘Waking up is hard to do’, and right from this chapter Tom establishes the narrative of how manipulated our lives have become at the hands of the capitalists. Moreover, how surprisingly have we willingly surrendered to this manipulated normalcy. We wake up by the alarm which is absurd in itself if we strip it from its normalcy; our sleep is now directed by a gadget so that we shouldn’t be late for work. Moving forward in the book, this narrative of stripping the normalcy off of our daily routines and how we live our lives becomes the great tool of disillusionment that Hodgkinson uses brilliantly. Although we in times of desperation do lash out against the structuredness of life and how it doesn’t seem normal, in this book it is done so continually and with great witty arguments. The reader, with a participative nature, sooner or later becomes convinced the what we call normal is indeed not normal at all; that how we live our lives today would seem absurd, and even grotesque, to someone living a hundred and fifty years ago. Chapter three at 10 am is titled ‘Sleeping in’, and it is an employed person’s ‘civil disobedience’ against the 9 to 5 culture. Tom argues how waking up by an alarm is hard not because we are lazy but because it is wrong, we should be still in bed at 10am, only slightly nearing our natural waking from our sweet sleep. ‘The death of lunch’ at 1 pm, ‘The nap’ at 3, ‘The pub’ at 10 – all these chapters follow the routined hours of an employee and explains how our each one of us is slaved by the dictating nature of work life. Tom himself, however, restrains from becoming dictating and only presents arguments of how life, and indeed our days, can be lived otherwise. Reading this book, it is very difficult for someone not to yearn and sympathize with such a liberating way of life – however distant and unreasonable it may seem.
I encountered this book during that yearlong depression, when I was searching for books on ‘unemployment’. I wanted to use something that I was good at – reading – to help me cope with something I wasn’t good at – finding a job. ‘How to be Idle’ came up as one of the recommendations and it immediately appealed to me. I had been familiar with the idea of this anti-cultural and anti-capitalist and anti-work hustle movement; I had read a bit of and about Marx, I knew of the 60s hippy movements, and I had read a book titled ‘How to do Nothing’ by Jenny Odil, subtitled ‘how to avoid the attention economy’. Besides, I always felt closer to the Eastern philosophy of living, which in a nutshell focuses on the inner world and therein finds all one can take out of life. However, my own society, as countless others, had immediately and almost mindlessly adopted the Western ideals of hustle and the possibility of ‘a better life’ – like a local version of the American dream, if you will. Therefore, while I wasted each day much the same by lying around, being anxious all the time (imagine being consistently so for almost a year, with little to none relief in between – now that is hell, right there) I felt more and more the guilt and cruel criticism of ‘not doing anything’, which until then I had thought to be a noble pursuit. And this is actually where the friction lies: a life of idleness, while arguably possible, will always be taken as an ideal, unreachable, thereby a fruitless pursuit, while the work culture is not only, apparently, beneficial for you but also your only choice basically. In an interview with Noam Chomsky about the modern day office jobs, the interviewee defends this neoliberal structure of unhindered capitalism by saying that an employee can always choose to opt out, to quit, thereby explaining that he is not a slave like the olden times. Chomsky replies: “Yes – and then choose to starve. It’s either your job for most of your life or starving – how libertarian.”
As I menntioned before, Hodgkinson never really lashes out at the reader for being a coward and a slave to free market economy. He disillusionizes his readers about life that we have come to accept and then with good spirit and strong argument shows how a life other than this is possible as well – where one still sleeps till 10 am if one wants to, that one still takes an afternoon nap as one should, that the pub hours should go beyond midnight, and that conversations hit deep around 2am at night. But the question comes, since such abundant and free freedom immediately feels wrong and suspicious, that where would the money come? One still has to pay the bills, buy groceries, have some kind of health insurance, some savings, rent money or maintenance money if one owns a house, money for school and vacations and clothing, and for pub beer that you’d be drinking past midnight – where does that money come from? Again, this is not a practical guidebook which gives the readers a systematic set of steps for breaking from their job, but rather a poetic and nostalgic appeal for living your life, despite your compulsions, in a better way – in the way of an idler. It is no longer a secret that our current pattern of life – education, job, family, job, retirement, death – is not a good one. There are numerous researches about how this way of living reduces the quality of life despite the comforts this work culture helps provide to people in general, like electricity, internet, cars, technology, etc. The cost outweighs the benefits – but damn are those benefits so addicting that it has basically become our guilt-free, normal, accepted needs. “Sahoolat se guzar jaon meri jaan, Kahin jeney ki khatir marr na rahiyo. (Let go of your comforts, my dear, otherwise you’d die for the very sake of living) – Jaun Elia.” Being fair, then, yet also naïve, Hodgkinson also criticizes the industry for having built such a system and for running it so robustly, nonstop. Here he takes the help of many acclaimed writers of the past who were either themselves idlers or championed idleness in their works. In doing so, there develops a picture, a narrative, of the origins of our modern life and how life used to be beforewards. Tom is being fair by having this double-edged sword, where on one hand he pokes the reader, on the other he slashes the indifferent market economy. As one Vox video on YouTube aptly pointed out: it is not you, phones are designed to be addictive.
It always frustrates me to experience that knowledge does not equal action. I know this should not be so, that knowledge once acquired should propel the person to act accordingly, to act better and with awareness. But maybe it is another case of naivety. In reality, having knowledge about something does not rid you, or break you free from the chains and bonds that either you yourself have acquired or the world has put on you. Alas, thus knowing that an idle life is perhaps the best of lives, taken with its necessary precautions, and that it might as well be possible, does not equal an action of ditching the career narrative, quitting one’s job, moving in the family, doing the bare minimum to retain that freedom of personhood, and just explore life to its furthest and deepest. Knowledge, here too, does not equal action. ACCA and a future career as an accountant or auditor goes against the very commandments of an idler’s life. Not only am I giving away my freedom for a certain salary, and do overtime managing or approving or even advising those greedy capitalists’ accounts, I am also directly helping them earn better in the coming financial year. Wealth maximization of the shareholders is the core principle of financial managers, and I fucking laugh at that with rage and bafflement. Progress in tech, health care, life enhancing products, is one thing – but total greed and incessant growth of economy for the sake of growth is just bullshit. I feel so happy and triumphant when I see the pitfalls of capitalism and how the world leaders are on the brink of colliding and then collapsing, or when I here the experts say that capitalism might not survive this century. I feel happy for the future generations, however also scared for they’ll live in much more existential world where they’d have to face machines rather than greedy humans.
Yet Tom’s book is a reminder that
an idler’s life is possible here and now. That one could meet somewhere in the
middle – not totally quitting one’s career (or else one would starve) and not
totally submitting one’s livelihood, personhood, and vigor for life to mere
office jobs that don’t really matter at the end. “Captivity is consciousness /
So is liberty” writes Emily Dickinson, and so if one is free in mind, in sync
with it, and in control of it, then one is at liberty to enjoy life in its quieter
and smaller moments, to keep the source of aliveness alive. Who knows, maybe
one day by good luck or by playing the game differently and winning early, a
total idler’s life might indeed be possible in reality. Until then, I give How
to be Idle four stars.
March 13, 2025.