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afd4d70
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In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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f7a34d1
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I count it as an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. A nap is a perfect pleasure and it's useful, too. It splits the day into two halves, making each half more manageable and enjoyable. How much easier it is to work in the morning if we know we have a nap to look forward to after lunch; and how much more pleasant the late afternoon and evening become after a little sleep. If you know there is a nap to come later in the day, ..
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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ab46588
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Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.
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drinking
guilt
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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86905c0
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W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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be50ae9
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The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.
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idleness
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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e1e6c48
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Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
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illness
pain
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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fc9228d
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We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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65cf500
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When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else."
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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efc4198
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If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been..
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freedom
anarchism
capitalism
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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c2669da
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It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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bbf760f
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Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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51a2ba4
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The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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867bdf4
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Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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b15e6b3
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Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.
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idleness
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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f1a11d5
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After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. 'Rise and Shine!' he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portraied in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal...
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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2737af4
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Career is just posh slavery.
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slavery
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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a74168f
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Existuje posetila predstava, ze nema cenu neco delat, pokud v tom nejste absolutne nejlepsi, coz vede k tomu, ze vetsina z nas nedela vubec nic.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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f18908a
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It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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8dcffb4
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Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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460994b
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Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man's striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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02cd8b8
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It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn't allow us to be more idle. He replied: I think the reason we don't organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, "idle hands are the devil's tool." In other words, institutions fear idle populatio..
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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b0054f5
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We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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9b612b7
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Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism - they adore it, it's good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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14cc110
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We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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692197f
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Being safe is fiction.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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6740238
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It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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296e149
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Male deti poznaji lepe Coca-Colu nez porek. Je to tim, ze Coca-Cola za marketing rocne utrati dve miliardy dolaru.
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reklama
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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bec31d2
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Sledovani televize je pasivni. Neni to dovednost. Kdyz budete casteji sledovat televizi, nezlepsite se v tom.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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3e626d7
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Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in "An Apology for Idlers" (1885): "Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogm..
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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f532c13
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It seems no body's business to try to better things
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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2adb566
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It's easier to robe the poor.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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66b321f
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Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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384923e
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Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish yo..
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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8a1dd62
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Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.
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truth
boredom
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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1c1b38d
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Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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baa4baf
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Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.
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insurance-policy
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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c27e314
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If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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2c66806
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the terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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bc3690a
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Winston Churchill, who abhorred laziness in other people, himself took a nap every afternoon. He defended his afternoon doze in practical terms as an absolute necessity: You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginati..
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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812628a
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We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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5ba5ad3
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there is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there.
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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927c4d8
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The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment."
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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84f1558
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One of the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important & that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. Bertrand Russell
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Tom Hodgkinson |
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9f9f51d
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Don't bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.
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Tom Hodgkinson |