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In praise of idleness – Bertrand Russell

Can't switch off from work? Envy those 'lazy' strikers? In this 1932 essay, Bertrand Russell, socialist and winner of some minor award called the Nobel Prize in Literature, presents the case for idleness. One can also download and/ or listen to an audio version here.

the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

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