Lifestyle: You know those awful, darkly menacing radio ads for burglar alarms, which try to convince you that right at this very minute there is some reprobate planning to steal all your earthly possessions, and only by splashing out on some alarm system can you rest easy?
Not only are those ads irritating, they are also profoundly dishonest, and, in Tom Hodgkinson's view, one of a number of modern ills that are collectively depriving us of our freedom. In this book, Hodgkinson promises to "look at the barriers to freedom and how we can rid ourselves from anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, governments, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melancholy, pain, depression and waste . . . We have given these enemies power over us and only we can remove that power . . . Life is about recapturing lost freedoms". Call Oprah's Book Club, this is gonna be a hit - even the most ambitious of self-help books don't pretend to solve that much woe.
Hodgkinson, however, is no regular lifestyle guru, but the founder of the Idler magazine and author of the cult hit How To Be Idle. And in those titles lie a clue to Hodgkinson's over-riding philosophy: we work too hard and worry too much; if we all just chilled out a little, life would be nice and easy. His advice for living a free life is simple and obvious - happiness comes not from material achievement but from rewarding relationships with family and friends. Everything else we're sold as being necessary is actually restricting our freedom. Say goodbye to the expensive consumer items, the mortgage, the career ladder . . . heck, quit your job altogether, it only brings stress and misery.
As an alternative, Hodgkinson looks to an unlikely source. "I look to the past for ideas for the future . . . We snigger and scoff at the feudal system of work, counting ourselves very lucky today, but a sober examination of the manorial system of the 11th to 15th centuries would suggest that the supposed illiterate, bonded peasants had more freedom, more riches and were more self-sufficient than the average wage slave of today." In Hodgkinson's mind, "Merry Old England" was a land where everybody baked bread and drank brews and was happy, until the Puritans instilled a punishing work ethic and the party ended. Such idiosyncratic thinking is brave, but his simplistic adulation of pre-Puritan society quickly begins to grate - it sounds as if his research was conducted by watching Robin Hood movies.
Furthermore, his whimsical style is rather forced - he flits from idea to idea, so a discussion of Prince Peter Kropotkin's theories on the genesis of medieval cities segues straight into the benefits of permaculture in less than a page. His staccato anecdotes show that not only has he freed himself from capitalism and convention, but also from the pressure to continue a train of thought for more than two paragraphs.
He expounds on the joys to be derived from being creative - he's obviously never had writer's block - but ignores that, for many people, having to be creative is equivalent to having to work. But he has a point about the modern work culture: "Call centres bore their customers to tears, and they bore their employees to death." Having survived a near-fatal brush with call centre employment, this writer can only agree with Hodgkinson's general diagnosis, but his suggested cures seem less like medicine and more like homeopathy - they sound swell, but you wouldn't trust them to treat your chest infection.
"We bore ourselves in order to earn the money that we will later spend in trying to de-bore ourselves," he says, and while he is skilled at depicting all that is wrong with modern capitalist society, his main suggestion is that we find bucolic retreats, tend vegetables and learn crafts. He ends his chapters with gnomic phrases such as "play the ukelele", "stop voting" and "ride the chariot of fire", but he might as well finish with the wisdom that "you won't find freedom in a book".
Davin O'Dwyer is a freelance journalist
How To Be Free Tom Hodgkinson Hamish Hamilton, 352pp. £14.99
