Sometimes, I say, I feel as if all I really want to do is watch TV and knit all day.
It’s been a busy few weeks, or months, or decades. I like a busy life, always have. For a week or two, I like it when I’m right on the edge of busier than is actually possible or sensible, when I’m pulling things off by the skin of my teeth hour by hour. Whee, look how high I can go! And then, inevitably, the exhilarating tremor of high speed becomes an alarming wobble and it’s time to ease off a little before it all goes horribly wrong.
My younger son shakes his head with the weariness of experience. You wouldn’t like it, he says, I tried it, it’s not fun.
After Leaving Cert, he said he wanted several weeks of doing absolutely nothing, of late mornings and slow days and snacks at odd hours. Fair enough, he’d worked hard, and it was certainly preferable from the parental point of view to a drink-fuelled week with his classmates somewhere hot and far away. But he takes after me, and after a few days he was bored and edgy, looking for work and structure and the rhythms of exertion and recreation.
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I feel as if I’d like to try it, I say, getting up from the breakfast table to make a list of the groceries I need to pick up on the way back from a meeting, which I plan to attend with gym clothes under my dress so I can stop off for an exercise class after the supermarket, leaving time for a quick shower before teaching an online class which will end in time for me to finish work on a book review due the next day before making dinner. This is no complaint; I deeply appreciate my good fortune in earning a living doing things I enjoy with a flexibility that allows me to stay fit and cook every day. I am happy. And I am busy.
My son’s post-exam experiment is not one most adults get to try, and I think a lot of us live with the idea that only necessity and striving and self-discipline stop us spending our days in passivity and indolence.
That idea is promoted, for obvious reasons, by the ‘wellness’ industry and by capitalism more generally. Do more, buy more, earn more, consume more goods and services; if you need rest and recreation, buy it here, from us, and buy the right clothes in which to rest and recuperate and some smelly candles to get you in the mood and take a class so you can rest and recuperate in accordance with the latest trend, and don’t forget to take photos to post on social media run by oligarchs so your friends feel the same obligation to buy the same goods and services for their rest and recuperation.
Knitting and watching TV are not, of course, exempt from consumerism and ostentation. Making and broadcasting television is expensive, not easily done by artisanal workers’ co-operatives. I have not found some morally pure source of eco-friendly fair-trade drama series to stream, and though I try to buy sustainable yarn and needles from small retailers, it’s still shopping, and I still do more of it than any interpretation of ‘need’ would cover. (Though one of the reasons I like knitting is that it’s not about ‘need’. I do fancy lace and colourwork, for joy.) But though the knitting is in some sense productive – of nothing useful – the odd evening spent that way feels illicitly passive. All very well once in a while after hard work, certainly not a daytime activity.
I’ve sometimes tried to convince students who want to measure their value by some metric of productivity that human worth is founded in nothing you can count, that the idea that we would deliquesce into slothfulness without the whips of capitalism is untested but probably untrue. For a while, perhaps, but in the same way that we wake after sleep, and long for movement and fresh air after a period of indoor stillness, so curiosity and creativity revive after enough rest.
Little in our culture teaches us to trust our minds and bodies – there is no money to be made that way – but if the coming weeks afford any you time for the experiment, my hypothesis is that our appetite for indolence is surprisingly quickly satiated.
