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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257677

伯特兰·罗素 (Bertrand Russell) 的这篇文章《对闲散的赞美》主张减少工作时间和促进休闲时间，认为这会带来文化进步和创新思想。罗素强调历史人物，例如中世纪的僧侣，在空闲时间做出了重大贡献。他建议建立一个满足基本需求的乌托邦社会，允许个人自由探索创造力和知识。拉塞尔将这一愿景与工业化世界对生产力和效率的强调进行了对比。尽管承认这一愿景的吸引力，但作者最终认为，由于社会的复杂性以及不断进步以实现伟大想法的必要性，它可能无法以最纯粹的形式实现。相反，提出了一种将工作和休闲结合起来的平衡方法，以及全民识字和最少的体力活动。本文还讨论了无聊在培养创造力方面的作用。

I read In Praise of Idleness when I was 13-14 because an older person recommended it to me. Although the essay was written in the 1935, he convinced me this was the future, and that it foretold what European life was going to be. And indeed, modern Western Europe lives this way -- where leisure is accorded importance, hard work is not the highest virtue, and citizens were free to create culture and invent new ideas. As evidence, he pointed to all the discoveries made by medieval monks and people with idle time to play with ideas, as opposed to the proletariat who worked but did not have the luxury to think higher thoughts. Idleness was thus the pre-condition for great ideas.

In a sense, this is the vision of UBI -- where basic needs were met, and people were free to self-actualize.

This is also the happy version of tenure in academia -- where you didn't have to worry about "publish or perish" but instead you get to work on really important ideas without showing results for years (multi year grants or being in a place like the IAS helps).

Google in some ways used to operate like this before the current pivot -- many googlers lived a life of "resting and vesting" while wandering about for years looking for a big idea with little pressure to deliver anything.

I definitely found this vision attractive, but as I grew older, I realized that it was not entirely tenable in it purest form. Yes, the best ideas certain came from having time to wander and work on different things (you get more creative working on multiple decorrelated ideas at the same time rather than one big idea), but in my experience, complete idleness without pressure to deliver anything does not work. I don't know if I believe the premise of In Praise of Idleness any more. We no longer live in a simple world. In a complex world, great ideas come from incrementalism, and keeping busy and making progress seems to be necessary in many domains in order get to the big idea because all the low hanging fruit have been plucked.

I think Russel, like many scientists, feels the need to dangle "the next big idea" as a tantalizing reason to allow more idleness. I do think that in an important sense, he is right and you are wrong, that "pressure to deliver" is not as necessary as you think, and that the world has not changed so much since his time so as for him to have once been right but now be wrong

However, I think this takes for granted the primacy of "big ideas" as the sole organizing principle we should arrange the world to efficiently produce, by force if necessary. I think the real argument for UBI is that self-determination is a core value, that the negotiations we make to better society neither need nor should involve a gun to the head of every person not born into wealth. I also think that overvaluing efficiency, expediency, and generally speaking impatience is pushing our species off a cliff

It turns out universal basic literacy (reading and math) and universal basic effort (2 hours of walking or equivalent anctivity) are even more important.

I agree with you that both of these things, and more, are important to encourage in society. In fact, I'd even say that literacy has more components than that, like for example understanding the importance of precision in language, like knowing that "effort" is an overly vague and connotationally loaded choice of words when describing the universal benefits of regular exercise. However, I'm not really sure why any this is relevant in the context of this discussion

Low-hanging fruit depletion is a problem, but there are ways of dealing with it:

- A larger number of people searching for the next Newtonian apple all over the place.

- A smaller number of larger groups that pursue a narrow area with intense focus. That’s more like “work” though.

- New areas. Especially software. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple were created by tinkerers with the privilege of free time. This process did not yet stop.

To your other point, not every idle person will pursue new knowledge. And that's ok. A larger number of idle people will contain a larger number of tinkerers.

I do wonder if the problem is not enough, or too much idleness.

Isaac Newton is regarded as a genius, but he worked on really basic stuff like calculus and Newtonian mechanics. Of course it was harder, when he and his competitors were inventing it.

Sure, we handle more complex stuff now. But modern highschool material used to be really complex. Eventually theory, frameworks, language, and pedagogy, develop around a field that make it look deceptively simple. That’s still incrementalism but incrementation comes from the next generation that grew up in an environment where our discoveries are table stakes.

Is it possible that you no longer live in a simple world, because you’ve become an expert, and moved on from ingesting the refined model from the previous generation, to either applying the current unrefined model to the hardest problems it can handle, or to building the model for the next generation?

To your point, I took a History of Math class in college, and one week we had to actually do calculus the way Leibniz and Newton would have done it. Some exercise that was easy in our modern notation was actually very painful using period accurate tools. I forget the details, but remember the feeling.

Another complication is that boredom was easier to come by in 1932. There are far more things competing with far more sophistication for our attention today. Boredom is underrated!

Re: your last paragraph

I would say there's a mid-point somewhere between overworked 60-hour-a-week employees burning out and folks doing absolutely nothing productive. The nature and environment of work is important too, if you're tilling a farm there's an upper limit on your output, but with the internet anyone can be made to feel inadequate for not "hustling"/"grinding" enough.

My friend professional musician says that it's a common myth that muse comes to artists randomly.

He says the best inspiration comes from invoices, and deadlines definitely help.

"[A]ll the low hanging fruit have been plucked" from these trees.

In a complex, highly multi-dimensional space, yes, there's always a hill to incrementally climb. There are other hills.

Incrementalism gets you necessary data; but not necessarily insight.

EDIT Of course, following up an idea is work.

Maybe low hanging fruit only hang low in hindsight. There’s a kind of control-certainty associated with some things, we got this, and there are some things where we at least know what we need to work on. Other things are more vague. So we now have more of the first category (in some areas) and this makes the apples appear to be lower than they were and most likely still are.

I think most niches right now are vulnerable to someone with passion to come in and completely change everything. The only exception being limited items like GPUs and oil.

Online dating for example is a complete hellscape and there's room for about a thousand passionate individuals to come in at various angles to try to improve it.

> Google in some ways used to operate like this before the current pivot -- many googlers lived a life of "resting and vesting" while wandering about for years looking for a big idea with little pressure to deliver anything.

I think Valve works like this too (not sure if they stopped)

It might be a low hanging fruit problem, but just look to all the great ideas that took the tireless efforts of tens of thousands of people to bring to life. Few modern marvels are the product of an solitary, idle daydreamer.

To connect with modern dialogue, we’re talking about the “idea guy”.

It comes down to honesty. Are you idle because you want to be idle or are you just being lazy and not going after the opportunity right before you? Are you not pursuing the low-hanging fruit out of principle or is your ego holding you back from doing humbler things?

If you can be honest with such questions then the duality goes away and everything boils down to doing the right thing

Why shouldn't you sleep more if you want to? Why should you feel under pressure to not sleep because you have to add 0s to some billionaire's account - that's exactly what my daily work is about BTW.

If you're actually tired enough to sleep for 15 hours a day then you need it and you'll be much more productive in the remaining 9 hours if you do it. If this condition persists more than say a couple of weeks (if you have some severe sleep debt) then see a doctor.

If you mean lying in bed awake but not really doing anything, then (a) thinking is doing something, (ii) if you're not thinking and just moping then there's a reason why you are depressed and it's not simply that you are just lazy. Right now, the political climate is a big one for a lot of people. And (3) maybe you just haven't stumbled on the right inspiration yet. It's random. Give it time. Go and do some stuff that seems kinda interesting, in the meantime.

I've been in a similar state for several months; I've done some stuff but nothing that exciting. Attending FOSDEM for the first time this year inspired me to join a hackerspace, and to read the code of some open source projects to learn how they work. Some days I stay in bed most of the day or just graze YouTube whether in bed or not (and I hate that after the fact). Some days I want to do something so I do it.

I was thinking recently that there's enough food to feed everyone but some people cannot afford to buy it. Hence there are food banks in an apparently "first world" country like the UK. Just to annoy some Americans...what's with the worlds richest country letting people be homeless? I remember a beautiful park in San Jose that I went to was full of rough sleepers and wondering how that happened in the middle of all that tech wealth.

Why? Why are there men who demand 50-whatever billion payouts in a country where not everyone has a place to sleep?

It seems the same issue to me. We're not on the earth to "do great things" or "achieve progress" or any of that crap. That's for people who have some special enthusiasm which the rest of us need not share, or, as Bertrand Russell says, for the elite who want us to labor for them. If one builds one's morality or sense of virtue on doing stuff one is a self-whipping slave and probably ready to become a slave driver for other people too.

> Why? Why are there men who demand 50-whatever billion payouts in a country where not everyone has a place to sleep?

It is my firm belief the US is only good if you’re rich. If you aren’t rich, well, you slave away to make other people rich.

The rich however need the poor to make their food, fix their cars, serve them lattes, deliver their groceries.

The only thing that will really effect change is if the poor (in vastly greater numbers) stands up and takes the boot off their necks.

> We're not on the earth to "do great things" or "achieve progress" or any of that crap. That's for people who have some special enthusiasm which the rest of us need not share, or, as Bertrand Russell says, for the elite who want us to labor for them. If one builds one's morality or sense of virtue on doing stuff one is a self-whipping slave and probably ready to become a slave driver for other people too.

Thank goodness there are people who do build their morality on "doing stuff": surgeons, cancer researchers, etc.

Some people innovate, and some (most) maintain. A healthy society needs a spectrum of endeavour.

I think our fundamental problem is that many of us do work that does not feel meaningful, and it seems that a lot of meaningful work is not respected and compensated as it should be.

Ask any healthcare worker about the issues in the medical field and they will say people are overworked, hospitals are short staffed, mistakes are made and patients die as a result of burnout and lack of any time to recharge or process traumatic incidents they see.

So while yes some groups do good work under pressure, no one does their best work under pressure, the opposite in fact.

I agree strongly with the last two paragraphs. I think the surgeon/medical example is nice (though not they certainly don’t work for free), but a lot of the ambitious people I’ve known all sought middle management or higher in some big company, which hardly seems like a good application of human potential.

A person researching cancer doesn't need to do it because they're desperate to pay off the mortgage. They can do it because it's interesting, or a personal challenge. There are a lot of people with advanced degrees now - we don't need to put enormous pressure on a few of them.

One can argue that the California homelessness crisis is caused by a certain type of idleness. NIMBYs refuse to adapt to their changing cities and instead try to force it to remain unchanged. You also have progressives who think that they can simply throw billions of dollars in tech money at homelessness, which is another form of idleness. As a result, you get nonprofits that receive millions of dollars a year that don't accomplish anything.

> Why?

If you're actually interested in learning why the homelessness situation in a particular area is how it is, you can pore over the countless (politicized) discussions of the issue to start piecing together the concrete issues and factors that contribute to it, beyond the vague notion of "rich country has homeless". Alternatively, take a specific example of one of those "50-whatever billion payouts", and your idea for converting it into the right combination of land-near-San-Jose, housing construction, mental health care, actual improvements to mental health, caretakers, government workers, outreach, policing, jobs programs, public infrastructure, etc, etc that's supposed to solve homelessness there. The internet commentariat is bound to have people eager to impolitely point out the issues in that plan.

No. Poverty is the default no matter what. From there, there are really only two methods of human interaction. The economic or the political. The economic means are voluntary and the political means are force. So far, all attempts at creating a third means either result in tyranny or in societal collapse.

The europeans seem to have succeeded in the middle state would you say? they have sacrificed some competitiveness for a more stable social framework. Not sure I agree that poverty is the default state no matter what.

The european way right now is to be a freerider. Get military coverage from US and sell assets to China/Russia/etc to get some money for now.

It will be interesting times once easy money dry up and US tells us to pay for our own defense.

The USA became the richest country despite many people having been made wealthy via corruption, and despite the establishment of a nearly all-powerful oligarchy.

I'm from Zimbabwe - so insults like "very European" aren't your get out of jail free card. The third world has an excuse for its problems - where's yours?

I, through a combination of fortune and misfortune, was able to retire at 40.

I am trying to figure out how to employ my hands in ways I enjoy and that may be of net benefit to society at this time, and this essay touches on a lot of the concepts I've been thinking over. I'm actually surprised I haven't run across it; I should probably start my search by reading a little deeper into some philosophy.

You could try first doing that which is a net benefit to yourself, and your family (non-monetary) then extend that onto your immediate community

Congrats on retirement :)

I think every discussion about this should focus on what exactly are the things that need to happen that no one would do if not coerced by either force or threat of destitution. How do we make sure those things get done and done well is a constraint of any economic changes we make to make things more fair. Also keeping in mind some of those things need to organize 1000s of people, how do you mine lithium in one place, and ship it across the world to 200 other places without financial incentives, how would you fuel the ships, load and unload them, track their location, repair and maintain them. I think it's pretty obvious things could be MUCH better and our current solution is very sub-optimal, but also that the problem being solved is very complex and the solution we have mostly works, but also there is a lot of work that is not particularly fulfilling or attractive to do, and especially not going to self incentivize anyone to do it well. Also it's clear markets are the best way to signal demand. So you really want to keep all of that, while getting rid of some of the biggest exploitative extractive inefficiencies in the current system.

If everyone had to perform an equal portion of the labor that's needed but nobody wants to do, the need for that labor would be minimized.

If Zuckerberg or Musk (and everyone else) had to pick up trash one day a month they'd spend their capital solving those problems (automating them away) instead of whatever the hell they think is so important right now.

The author is suggesting normalizing a 20 hour work week, and an approximate doubling of hourly wages for the majority of workers. (And continuing to reduce the hours worked per week until full employment is reached).

Work that is unattractive would presumably still be incentivized by higher wages.

> In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

There will be hundreds of people here that fit this perfectly, or am I wrong about the demographics of HN?

"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer as they must"

There is a reason we work constantly and always. Nature is brutal, and if I am not among the best, I'm going to experience pain.

Or at least that is what my 'trauma' pushes me to do. I'm literally afraid not to be a 1%er. And if you lived my life, have my experiences, you'd probably come to the same conclusion.

OP didn’t mean literally 1 percent. They meant as close to number 1 as possible, and never stopping even if they are number one.

They are afraid that they would be discarded by society if they fall too far behind.

I don't care about being discarded, but I do care about financial security. I grew up with near nothing, and I'll fight and claw to never end up there again.

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

Source: Thuc. 5.89, justification for Athen's invasion of Melos, 416 BC.

The full quote is even more brutal:

"We shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

> Nature is brutal, and if I am not among the best, I'm going to experience pain.

Working so hard to get into the 1% is also very painful. Looks like, in your philosophy, pain is inevitable, and you only get to choose which form of it you take.

> There will be hundreds of people here that fit this perfectly, or am I wrong about the demographics of HN?

Why would there be people on HN not wanting people earning less than them to have leisure?

People are free to bicycle, hike, rock-climb, and do whatever the fuck they want.

The only thing I don't want is wage-earner longing for my savings through taxes so they can buy Luis Vitton man purses.

And I want to be free to buy whatever the fuck I want with my hard-earned money: be it luxury cars or audiophile (audiofool, I don't care) audio gear.

But I don't give a crap what others do.

I understand everything and maybe even agree with the main thesis. But the positive example that he gives is Soviet Russia, which that time (1932-1933) went through massive famine in literally the most fertile land in the world which was caused by completely artificial reasons. And Soviet workers were forced to work more than ever without any payment. So the solutions in the article cannot be taken seriously.

Russell was quite critical of Marxism afaik. He admires some things about Soviet Russia but certainly not all of it. I don’t think he says we should aspire to emulate Soviet Russia for the most last.

I have been bingeing on ttng for a year now. I thought of the song when I saw the title and didn't realize maybe it was inspired from the essay. Saw the mention of TTNG and it got me excited enough to log in and comment after a long time, hurrah!

I am thrilled to cross-paths with another TTNG fan online; I know a grand total of 1 fan outside of the internet. They are criminally underrated and I am praying that despite their years-long-silence we’ll get some new material and another tour in the near future.

I like this essay but I've found it hard to be idle. I jumped aboard the FIRE train so I could coast the rest of my life, and quit my job once when I was 31 and then when I was 33 after working for a year.

Now I'm working the same dead end job again and I don't mind it. When I'm not working I'm consuming YouTube, HN and reddit. Not sure how to love idleness again.

I used to be able to sit still for an hour at a time (meditation).

You seem to have really misunderstood the essay, then. He uses the word "idleness" to be provocative, but he's not actually saying that people find fulfillment in sitting and staring at the wall. He explicitly calls for efforts to be made to help everyone to learn enough about a wide enough variety of topics that they can choose their own interests to pursue in their leisure time.

From the essay:

> It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.

> ...

> When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

This is wonderful but I guess what I'm saying is: whether I'm jobbing 24 hours a week like I do now, or 55 hours like I used to, or zero hours, I spend all the remaining time in pure frivolity (what he calls passive pleasures).

Modern civilization's cult of efficiency combined with the ease of frivolous entertainment must have beaten the leisure out of me.

Not all people use their downtime like you of course. Some people make art or music, or go on adventures in new places or the woods. Maybe work on projects at home. One of the downsides of the internet generation is we’ve filled our downtime with things like reddit with an infinite scroll extension vs things that can be more personally impactful perhaps that older pre internet generations would engage with.

It is hard to talk about leisure, when definition is not clear. I’m not sure what yours is, but I try to stick with the one I think the article is using, namely energy to spend on top of survival efforts. I understand that you have energy to spend, but you are stuck in the city dweller passivity the article talks about. Being mindful of the situation is the first step to take action changing it.

I've (GP commenter) read the essay several times in the past and enjoyed it each time.

My comment was a self-reflection of my failures in taking advantage of leisure time.

I've backpacked for 8 months and moved to a different country. It's all pretty boring, and I haven't found a hobby to stick to.

It seems like your comment implies not only did I not read the article but that I misunderstood the premise.

In my experience, having kids has had the dual benefits of making my days purposeful and fulfilling, and also more appreciative of idle time. The mind does not do well with the extremes of unlimited idleness or unlimited work. Turns out the rhythm of child-raising can fit the perfect middle ground between work and idleness, and has the advantage of creating a more meaningful cumulative product than either realm. That balance of time is especially true if you're financially independent or have family willing to help during the first year or two of a new baby.

Same, I don't think we can lump all different personas and natures into one bucket. Some people thrive, and enjoy doing, building, learning, and not staying in one place. Others enjoy sitting, relaxing, doing little, introspection, etc. It really depends on the individual, each has their own areas that give them meaning and joy.

If one works in a field where there is already an issue of abundance, which is (nowadays) basically any field that produce information, it's better for the society to produce less, but higher quality, more meaningful work. Of course, it is hard to do so because the incentives are against it.

Fun fact - if you search your file system for idleness.txt you'll probably find it includes quite a few copies as npm/node likes including it in its packages. I seem to have 30 on my macbook.

Related: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" -French philosopher Blaise Pascal, 1654

Indeed I can never enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness.

To me the sin is not to get the most out of life and especially not devoted most of life to a passion. To me the sin is to stop "evolving". Getting sunshine is mostly for health benefit.

I keep asking myself: Did I learn more about the universe? Did I improve myself today? Of course most of the time the answer is no, but I still try to get some yes occasionally.

A bit of idleness for sure is an antidote for burnout, but the Mediterranean sunshine idleness is way way too much for my taste.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization.

True sensible organization has never been tried!

This made me think of this passage from "Happy to Work Here: understanding and improving the culture at work" which is on the web[0]:

The business of busyness is a contradiction in terms. The more politics forces you to look busy, the less time there is for real business. An old joke to set the tone for this section:

A group of excited young curates crashes into the office of the Archbishop at St. Patrick’s cathedral. “Your Eminence!” one of them cries. “Jesus Christ has just appeared in lower Manhattan!” “What?!” “He walked across the water and came ashore in Battery Park.” “Oh my.” “And now he’s headed up Fifth Avenue toward St. Patrick’s. He could be here any minute!” “I see.” “So, tell us, Eminence, what do we do?” The Archbishop thinks that over for a moment and finally says, “Look busy.”

An apparent busyness can be a sign of deep and very professional engagement in an important task, vital to the long-term interests of the organization. Or it might be a sign of something else entirely. In a fearful organization it most likely implies a worry that it’s downright unsafe to seem unbusy. The unspoken rule that governs people in this case is:

Look busy.

Of course, the fear itself has already done damage to the organization’s culture. But obedience to the unspoken rule makes the matter worse. The consequences of everyone trying to look busy include:

• No time for reflection

• No time to confer with colleagues (which might be interpreted as “chatting”)

• No time for lunch

• No time for training

• Nobody willing to be away from his/her desk

• No off-site activities

• A general uneasiness with activities that might seem “passive” like reading, and research.

Most of the things that the rule makes impossible are culture positive. That is, they help the culture heal and improve itself. The more you find yourself and your co-workers compelled to look busy, the surer you can be that your working culture is damaged.

[0] https://systemsguild.eu/

This is parts of what I enjoy by working as an academic. I can get into a comfortable position with a book, take a walk or go to the gym during my workday without any judgement. I find that it is very helpful to be able to do something physical while thinking about a hard problem, and conversely being able to leave my desk and do something else for a short while if I am struggling to get into my work. I am a lot more productive than when I was a consultant and was busy trying to look busy.

A point that one of the comments here addressed but I think is worth re-emphasising - Russell isn't talking about not working, but rather to not work in a way that's not productive - which often occurs if you need to be in office till 5pm because I told you so!"

I would recommend Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Leisure” [0]. Leisure is not recreation. Indeed, the word “school” is derived from the Greek word for leisure, and the state of having to work was defined in terms of the lack of leisure, a negation of leisure. The leisure/work distinction is also reflected in the classical division of the liberal arts and the servile arts. (The liberal arts were what free men pursued, for the sake of wisdom, virtue, etc. The servile arts were for the sake of practical ends.) Work was understood as something you did for the sake of leisure (but again, not leisure as we understand it today which is at best recreation), not as work for work’s sake.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp...

I read Intellectuals by Paul Johnson and it occurs to me that even generously doubting the book, Bertrand Russell comes off as a real scumbag, complete womanizer, generally untethered person and despite being prodigiously intelligent, simply unwise.

Also defending idleness seems like the sort of opinion the well-off espouse, Russell carried around accounting of every cent he made, just to cheer him up whenever he felt down.

A shorter version with much greater bite and wit by Nietzsche published in 1882:

329 Leisure and idleness. - There is something of the American lndian, something of the savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the way the Americans strive for gold; and their breathless haste in working - the true vice of the new world - is already starting to spread to old Europe, making it savage and covering it with a most odd mindlessness. Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages - one lives like someone who might always 'miss out on something'. 'Rather do anything than nothing' - even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste. Just as all forms are visibly being destroyed by the haste of the workers, so, too, is the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements. The proof of this lies in the crude obviousness which is universally demanded in all situations in which people want for once to be honest with others - in their relations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, students, leaders, and princes: one no longer has time and energy for ceremony, for civility with detours, for esprit in conversation, and in general for any otium 2 ° For life in a hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else. And thus hours in which honesty is allowed are rare; during them, however, one is tired and wants not only to 'let oneself go' but also to lay oneself down and stretch oneself out unceremoniously to one's full length and breadth. This is the way people now write !etters, the style and spirit of which will always be the true 'sign of the times'. If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that overworked slaves make for themselves. How frugal our educated and uneducated have become concerning 'joy'! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a 'need to recuperate' and is starting to be ashamed of itself. 'One owes it to one's health' - that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside. Soon we may well reach the point where one can't give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa21 (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around: work was afflicted with a bad conscience. A person of good family concealed the faet that he worked if need compelled him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible: 'doing' was itself contemptible. 'Nobility and honour are attached solely to otium and bellum'22 - that was the ancient prejudice!

The Gay Science

Bertrand Russell did a great disservice to philosophy by reducing great minds and talent to what he understood of them. Philosophy departments haven't recovered since and now we seem to be in full swing going back to... fucking religion for ethics and morality spearheaded by the likes of Jordan Peterson.

The essay comes up every now and then in HN, 5 pages of it in search. I'm unsure if it reached the status of most shared essay yet. Does anyone know?

Looks about the same as other evergreens like Politics and the English Language and The Story of Mel to me. Greenest (i.e. earliest) evergreen is almost certainly Story of Mel, ever-est (most posted), I'm not sure but I want to say I've seen bigger ones than either of those.

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