Top 10 books about idleness | Josh Cohen

From Oscar Wilde to Sigmund Freud and David Foster Wallace, a psychoanalyst recommends reading that turns a critical eye on busyness

We’re living in a culture governed by a permanent compulsion towards frenetic activity or fevered distraction. Outside working hours, every pause seems almost reflexively to trigger a jolt of anxious guilt or shame that something – a laundry cycle, a tax return, a status update – remains undone.

The effect of this permanent busyness is to leave us feeling that inactive states have no meaning or validity in themselves; that they exist only to be filled in with some content. Inactivity increasingly exists for us as the negative of our “real” lives of activity and purpose.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DVsqGB

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