In Praise of Idleness (1932)
I cite this paper every chance I can get. Bertand would be rolling in his grave now about the current situation where we&#x27;ve gone completely in the opposite direction.<p>Here&#x27;s a Buckminster Fuller quote that I also like to share:
&quot;We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&quot; ― R. Buckminster Fuller<p>Neither of these guys were &quot;slackers&quot; and were brilliant men so it&#x27;s probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it&#x27;s not just a bunch of freeloading millennials.<p>I made a comment to a friend tonight about how odd it is that workplaces seem to be acting irrationally by just demanding more of people and trying to increase their grip, when I realize it&#x27;s honestly just like an abusive relationship. It would rationally help the business to foster loyalty and cooperation in this type of market but instead the narrative is &quot;NO ONE WANTS TO WORK&quot; and people who have been loyal in positions for many years are just being treated like dirt because their control and narrative is being questioned...and that&#x27;s pretty much exactly what happens in an abusive relationship when someone tries to leave, the abuser cracks down harder. Utterly bizarre to see such irrational behavior though.