Rest isn't idleness

⊕Related reading: Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” (1932); Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019). What I took from Odell was her discussion of idleness as a connection to place and nature.The difference [between rest and idleness] is not one of activity. A person resting and a person idling may look identical from the outside: both are in the chair, both are doing nothing the world would call work. The difference is in what the doing-nothing serves. Rest serves work. It is the trough between two waves of effort, valuable precisely because of the effort it enables. It can be defended in the language of productivity, which is why the productive world tolerates it: even your stillness, it turns out, can be made to justify itself by improving your subsequent motion. Rest is idleness with an alibi.

Idleness has no alibi, and wants none.

[…]

The rester is preparing to be useful. The idler has, for an hour, simply declined to be.

[…]

Some time should be wasted. That is the claim. Not all of it, not most of it, but some, deliberately, as a matter of principle.

⊕Even this process, collecting a commonplace book, would once have been considered idleness. And yet my gut is to make it part of my brand, my external marketed identity. Which would, in turn, shape its content.This hit home. I live in a hyper-capitalist moment, with AI promising something like infinite productivity. Here, rest is the thing I can justify. Idleness, which is enjoyable, which lifts me, is the thing that makes me feel guilty. The voice says: I could be working. I could be managing agents. I could be building the last wave of software. I could be playing with my daughter. I could be with my family.

Aside: the microeconomics of choosing idleness (and is that a valid question)

My microeconomics professor told me something I found beautiful. The choices we modeled in microeconomics were mathematically and intuitively simple (one good over another, an hour of labor against an hour of leisure), and sometimes in life they were.

At university, my optimization was between study, fitness, or socialization. Then I added work, and the dimensions became enriching my mind, work, fitness, social. Then a partner. Then a child. Each addition adds a dimension to the math,Each added dimension blows up the search: checking k options across d dimensions costs k^d evaluations; ten options per axis is 100 checks in two dimensions and 10 billion in ten. Bellman named this the “curse of dimensionality”: Bellman, R. E. (1957). Dynamic Programming. Princeton University Press. The diagram gives out even earlier: two goods make an indifference curve, three make a surface, and past that there is nothing to draw. and at some point we stop being able to solve and start leaning on heuristics, on satisficing.“Satisficing” is Herbert Simon’s word: Simon, H. A. (1956). “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment.” Psychological Review, 63(2), 129–138. His claim: real agents satisfice not out of laziness but because optimizing is computationally infeasible for the organism.

As AI cranks up the cost and opportunity cost of work, the heuristics are thrown out the window in math that was already too complex to solve. The price of idleness becomes harder and harder to math out.

And this essay suggests that if you do the math for this at all, it loses its “idleness”.