THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

The Bulgarian city of Plovdiv has an almost untranslatable word – “aylyak” – that manifests as a refusal to get caught up in the rat race and a scepticism about the value of overwork.

By Will Buckingham

5 November 2020

Bulgaria’s second city of Plovdiv is proud of its reputation for doing things its own way. As soon as you step off the bus from the capital of Sofia, you can feel the change in pace of life. People walk more slowly. They seem to have more time on their hands. The traffic is less hectic. As you walk to the city centre through the park, where old men gather to play chess and people lounge and chat in the shade of the old trees, Plovdiv immediately feels different. There’s a kind of insouciance to Plovdiv, something that is both immediately apparent and hard to put your finger on.

In the downtown Kapana district, people spill out of bars and cafes into the pedestrian streets. Under brightly painted murals on the walls, groups of young people hang out, flirt and check their phones. In the cafe by the Dzhumaya Mosque in the town centre, people sit for hours and sip cups of Turkish coffee. Even the cats in the cobbled streets of the old town seem more languid than elsewhere. They stretch and purr, then they roll over and go back to sleep. If you ask the people here why the city is so relaxed, they will tell you: Plovdiv, they will say, is “aylyak”.



Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second-largest city and one of the oldest cities in Europe

 (Credit: Nataliya Nazarova/Alamy)

The word “aylyak” is not much used outside of Plovdiv, even though it appears in Bulgarian dictionaries from the late 19th Century. It is a loan-word from the Turkish “aylaklık”, which means “idleness”, “dawdling” or “vagabondage”, and it’s rooted in the Turkish “aylık”, meaning “month”.

According to Yana Genova, director of the Sofia Literature and Translation House, the original meaning of aylyak was somebody hired to work month-by-month, who consequently knew what it was to have time on their hands. The verb that goes with aylyak is “bichim”, a derivative of the verb “bicha”, which means to strike, to whip, or to cut beams and boards from a tree trunk. The idea of striking, whipping or cutting is a reminder that aylyak is something active. If you want to practice aylyak, you have to slice out chunks of time for yourself. You must take the initiative to sever yourself from your daily concerns.

But whatever the origins of the word, in contemporary Plovdiv, aylyak has taken on its own meaning and significance, something not to be translated so much as lived. When you ask people to explain what it means, more often than not they will tell you a joke. The joke goes like this. A citizen of Plovdiv is hanging out with a Spanish visitor to the city. “What is aylyak?” the Spaniard asks. The Bulgarian thinks for a few moments, and then says, “It’s like your mañana, mañana, but without all the stress.”

In 2019, Plovdiv shared the title of European Capital of Culture with Matera in Italy. As a part of the City of Culture activities, one organisation – the Fire Theatre Mime Company, headed by Bulgarian actor, director and mime artist Plamen Radev Georgiev – ran a series of public consultations to explore aylyak in more depth. He wanted to know what aylyak is, what its origins are and how it became so closely associated with Plovdiv.



Plovdiv was awarded the title of European Capital of Culture in 2019

(Credit: Mehdi33300/Alamy)

I caught up with Georgiev in a cafe in Sofia. He was born in Stara Zagora, about 80km to the north-east, and when he arrived in Plovdiv in 2018, it was as an outsider to the complexities of aylyak culture. “Our research was difficult,” he told me. “People asked why we were interested in aylyak. They said it wasn’t a value at all. It was just laziness.”


It’s like your mañana, mañana, but without all the stress

But through the public discussions, a broader picture emerged. Aylyak, people said, was about finding time. It was about sitting down for breakfast with friends and finding that you were still hanging out by nightfall. It was about taking pleasure in your environment. It was tied in with social status, with a kind of dandyish wandering the streets with nothing to do. And, on a deeper level – Georgiev called this “Zen aylyak” – it was to do with freedom of the soul. “Aylyak means that you can be engaged with the difficulties of life, but you remain safe from all life’s problems,” he said.

In Sofia, many people I spoke with were sceptical about aylyak, seeing it as nothing more than Capital of Culture branding or hipster marketing. I, too, was unconvinced. So, I caught the bus from Sofia to Plovdiv, to spend several days in the city and whip some aylyak of my own. In Plovdiv, I talked to Dr Svetoslava Mancheva, an anthropologist and director of ACEA Mediator, an organisation dedicated to linking communities and urban spaces. Originally from Kardzhali in the country’s south-west, Svetoslava is a self-confessed convert to aylyak. She has been living in Plovdiv for 10 years and has no intention of leaving. “Many people come to live here specifically because it is aylyak,” she said. Her colleague, Elitsa Kapusheva, told me she was brought up in Plovdiv but recently moved back from Berlin. She was glad to be home, she said: Berlin was good, but it wasn’t aylyak.



The city has a uniquely relaxed vibe, with locals taking time to slow down and enjoy life (Credit: ICP/Alamy)

For Mancheva, aylyak is rooted in Plovdiv’s long history of cultural diversity. The historian Mary C Neuberger describes how the city was a thriving commercial hub in the 19th Century. Of all the cities in the Ottoman Empire, it was second only to Istanbul, and was home to Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Roma, Armenians and Slavs, crowded together in the streets and kafenes, or coffeehouses. Mancheva says that aylyak was a response to the challenges of living alongside strangers. “It’s about finding a space of your own in the city,” she said. “For me, the ground of aylyak is communication. You don’t need to like each other. What matters is the will to talk, the desire to understand.”

Historical accounts of Plovdiv’s coffeehouses in the 19th Century describe them as places where artisans and merchants mingled and where time passed slowly. The 19th-Century Bulgarian poet Hristo Danov wrote disapprovingly of how people spent all day in kafenes. People go to the kafene, he wrote, to smoke, talk, drink coffee, and “impatiently wait for the sun to set so they can move on to plum brandy”. Outsiders also picked up on Plovdiv’s uniquely relaxed feel. In his 1906 travel account, the British traveller John Foster Fraser was entranced by the pace of life in Plovdiv (then called Philippopolis):

“Picture the scene. A garden, lit with many lamps. Beneath the trees innumerable tables. At the tables sat ‘all Philippopolis,’ sipping coffee, drinking beer, toasting one another in litres of wine. At one end of the garden was a little stage. There was a Hungarian band which played rhapsodically… It was Sunday night and Philippopolis was enjoying itself.”



Plovdiv's 2nd-Century AD amphitheatre is one of the best-preserved ancient theatres in the world (Credit: Evgeni Dinev Photography/Getty Images)

As I chatted to Mancheva and Kapusheva about aylyak, they returned again and again to one idea. Aylyak is about finding space. It is about finding space in a busy day to drink coffee. It is about finding nooks and crevices in the city – alleyways, small parks, benches – where you can hang out with friends, play music, drink beer or chat. It is about making space for others when you communicate. And, as Georgiev told me, it is about finding a space of freedom in the middle of life’s difficulties. For those who have developed the knack, like Mancheva and Kapusheva, there is no better way of living.

Aylyak means that you can be engaged with the difficulties of life, but you remain safe from all life’s problems

After several days in Plovdiv, I lost my scepticism and learned how to bichim aylyak. I strolled the streets. I took it easy. And strangely, I found I got no less done, only everything was done with less stress. Towards the end of my stay, I wondered whether Plovdiv has something to offer the rest of the world. I emailed the Bulgarian writer Filip Gyurov, who researched aylyak as a philosophy of life and as an alternative to economic growth as part of his MSc thesis at Lund University. “It is not all about the hustle and bustle of the big city, the need to buy the newest tech toy, the need to always climb the social ladder,” Gyurov wrote to me. “People, especially young people, have experienced the awful side effects of burnout. Hence the need to slow down, to de-grow, to live more in sync with nature and ourselves.”

On my last afternoon in Plovdiv, I sat in the cafe outside the Dzhumaya Mosque. I ordered a Turkish coffee and a portion of kyunefe, a dessert that originated in the Middle East and that, in a stroke of culinary brilliance, combines baklava and cheese. The coffee arrived with a small glass of sweet rosewater syrup that took the edge off the bitterness. Beside the mosque, underneath the rose bushes, a ginger and white cat dozed peaceably. I didn’t have my watch. I felt no need to check my phone. I had no appointments to keep. I drank my coffee and let the afternoon unfold, knowing that I had all the time in the world.



Aylyak is rooted in Plovdiv’s long history of cultural diversity, when the city was a thriving commercial hub (Credit: Ivan Hristov/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Soul of the City is a series from BBC Travel that invites you to uncover the unique characteristics of cities around the world through the stories of the people who live there.

Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

www.marxists.org › archive › lafargue › lazy

Nov 13, 2003 — (1883). Written: Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883. Source: The Right To Be Lazy and Other Studies Translated: Charles Kerr First Published: ...

Some Chinese shun grueling careers for 'low-desire life'













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In this photo released by Guo Jianlong, Guo reads a book at the balcony of his home in Dali in southwestern China's Yunnan province on June 29, 2021. Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by choosing to "lie flat," or reject grueling careers for what they call a "low-desire life." That is clashing with the ruling party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its 1921 founding. 

Guo Jianlong via AP

JOE McDONALD and FU TING

BEIJING (AP) — Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China’s mountain southwest to “lie flat.”

Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life." That is clashing with the party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.


“Work was OK, but I didn’t like it much,” Guo said. “What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?”

“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” to a “cycle of horror” from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country’s most prominent business magazine.

“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply ‘lie flat?'”

It isn’t clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of major cities. Judging by packed rush hour subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese slog away at the best jobs they can get.

Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China’s population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5% from its 2011 peak.

“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness,” the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to ‘lie flat’ in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful.”

The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.

Official data show China’s economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.

In a sign of the issue’s political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat” declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.

Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, mobile phone cases and other “Lie Flat”-themed products are disappearing from online sales platforms.

Urban employees complain that work hours have swelled to “9 9 6,” or 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era,” a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.

Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell" of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.

“Chasing fame and fortune does not attract me. I am so tired,” said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old graduate student.

Some professionals are cutting short their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.

Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she is quitting at 45, a decade before the legal minimum retirement age for women, to move with her Croatian-born husband to his homeland.

“I want to retire early. I don’t want to fight any more,” Xu said. “I’m going to other places.”

Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party's announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two. The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.

Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.

Xia writes that she moved to a valley in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, for a “low-desire life” after working in Hong Kong. She said despite a high-status job as an English-language reporter, her rent devoured 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.

She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat” are giving up economic success when that's already is out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gulf between a wealthy elite and the majority.

“When resources are focused more and more on the few people at the head and their relatives, the workforce is cheap and replaceable,” she wrote on Douban. “Is it sensible to entrust your destiny to small handouts from others?”

Xia declined an interview request.

Guo, the writer in Dali, said he puts in more hours as a freelancer than he did at a newspaper. But he is happier, and life is more comfortable: He and his wife eat breakfast on their breezy sixth-floor apartment balcony with a view of trees.

“As long as I can keep writing, I’m very satisfied,” Guo said. “I don’t feel stifled.”

A handful who can afford it withdraw from work almost entirely.

A 27-year-old architect in Beijing said she started saving as a teenager to achieve financial freedom.

“From last September, when I saw all my savings had reached 2 million (yuan) ($300,000), I lay down,” said the woman, who would give only the name Nana, in an interview over her social media account.

Nana said she turned down a job that paid 20,000 yuan ($3,000) per month due to the long hours and what she saw as limited opportunities for creativity.

“I want to be free from inflexible rules,” said Nana. “I want to travel and make myself happy.”

___

Fu reported from Bangkok. Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to this report.

1. The Right To Be Lazy

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …

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VACATION TIME UNUSED

Commentary: Does the pandemic make it harder to take long stretches of annual leave?


It isn’t always about having too much to do or not knowing where to draw boundaries. Many still believe leave is wasted without travel, says CNA’s Grace Yeoh.

Workers in the office. (File photo: iStock)



Grace Yeoh@GraceYeohCNA
27 Aug 2021


SINGAPORE: I am quite the hypocrite when it comes to fighting hustle culture.

Despite reminding my friends of the importance of rest amid the pandemic and busy seasons at work, and writing many times about tackling burnout, I haven’t taken annual leave since the start of this financial year. As much as I am entitled to do so, I suspect I don’t really want nor see a need to.

But it’s not for want of trying.

In an attempt to walk the talk for this commentary, I signed into my company’s HR portal several times, stared at the amount of leave I have remaining, selected a two-week block when I could afford time off … and closed the tab without submitting my leave application.

This conundrum isn’t unique to the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, I found myself unable to completely “switch off” my work brain during my leave. I was constantly brainstorming new ideas for stories, on account of being on social media.

Eventually, it became hard to take leave because I was convinced it was a waste of time, since I was still “working”.

And when the pandemic hit, it forced me to slow down in my daily work habits. I no longer needed long stretches of leave to recuperate like I did pre-pandemic when leave was set aside for obvious leisure activities, such as travel.

Either way, I was stuck with mounting pressure to clear my annual leave — but now, with the added feeling that I’d be wasting it if I spent it in Singapore.

WHY WE DON’T TAKE LEAVE

I’m not alone in my failure to clear leave.

It might have been easier to find reasons to take leave before the pandemic; few people took a two-week break without leaving the country or making major plans with friends and family.

Still, we know people who didn’t clear their leave and accumulated so much that they had to give it up.

Whenever friends struggled with clearing leave pre-pandemic because they had too much work and not enough time to complete it before their leave, I’d scoff and tell them work is never ending, so it’s pointless to heap such an unrealistic expectation on oneself.

They would cite common reasons for not going on leave: Guilt for “abandoning” colleagues, unspoken expectations to maintain constant productivity to remain in an employer’s good books, tying self-worth to work performance. Some would even humblebrag that they couldn’t afford time off, seeing being busy as a mark of competence.

Underlying these reasons, however, was an inability to draw boundaries, which only seems to have worsened almost two years into work-from-home (WFH). For many of us, work has become the default, and life is whatever that’s left over after we’re done for the day, however late that may be.

WE STILL CAN’T TRAVEL

Pre-pandemic, travel was synonymous with rest, so we reserved long stretches of leave for faraway adventures. As a result, being unable to travel has affected our leave plans.

In December 2020, CNA ran a story about companies that adjusted their leave policies because employees were struggling to clear their leave since being unable to travel for leisure.

“Many employees tend to not take annual leave when they are working from home, as they do not feel like they need a ‘getaway’ from the office environment,” Ms Jaya Dass, Randstad’s managing director for Singapore and Malaysia, had shared

The report added that some employees hoped to carry their leave forward to this year for leisure travel purposes. This was despite no clear sign that we’d be out of the woods.

When the COVID-19 multi-ministry task force announced on Thursday (Aug 19) that Singapore would launch its first vaccinated travel lanes with Germany and Brunei on Sep 8, my social media feed was filled with excited updates from friends mentally planning their next trip.

Even though the news was merely a baby step towards travelling again, it offered a glimmer of hope that long holidays and quarantine-free travel weren’t a pipe dream anymore.

Yet, the news also lulled me into a false sense of hope that the country I’d been holding out for could be next in line, making me more reluctant to spend my annual leave. I’d been saving my leave to visit loved ones in Malaysia despite their rising COVID-19 case numbers.

While it’s unrealistic to save my leave until Malaysia reopens for international leisure travel, the allure of travel is understandable. With travel, our daily environment is markedly different, enforcing at least a physical escape from work, if not a mental one.

Work from home has altered the way we view leave.

(Photo: Mimi Thian/ Unsplash)


But WFH means we remain in the same space that we work on leave, making it harder to detach from work. For instance, we might decide to check our email to mitigate the stress of clearing hundreds of emails at once upon return to work, and refusing this impulse is harder now since we’re within close reach of our work desk while on leave.

Even if we cave and attend to work just once a day, these minute actions pile up, preventing us from completely going on vacation. For some of us, we’d still feel on edge during our leave that we might even require another break to decompress from the break.

Ultimately, using a long stretch of leave to do anything "less than" travel feels futile and wasteful now.

CHANGING OUR PERSPECTIVE OF LEAVE

Regardless of whether we want to clear our leave, the reality is we need to. Those of us who experience inertia could start to look at annual leave in a different light.

For one, there’s no need to take a large chunk at once, even though this may have been our norm before the pandemic.

Instead, we could consider taking a day’s leave every alternate week, ensuring we work four-day weeks at least twice a month.

Related:


From unlimited leave to four-day weeks, some firms are embracing more flexible time-off policies


There have already been loud calls to implement a four-day work week, with some companies like Microsoft Japan already finding gains, according to a Forbes report from 2019. Workers were “happier” and there was also a “40 per cent gain in productivity”.

But rather than wait for policymakers or employers to decide what’s best for us, perhaps we can experiment with this idea ourselves.

For me, Wednesday is the best day of the week to go on leave, because it allows me to be hyper productive for a short two days, take a breather, then go full force again for a couple of days before the weekend.

Even though it might appear such a brief break barely allows us to destress before we dive right back into work the next day, this single-day leave isn’t about deep rest. It’s simply akin to a hydration pitstop in a marathon, replenishing our energy for the next leg.

Moreover, taking a day off on a constant basis, rather than accumulating leave only to take a few weeks at once, might give you something to look forward to regularly and help mental wellbeing in the long term.

Related:

Commentary: Cure to burnout requires a pervasive culture of rest

Alternatively, consider this radical approach: We don’t need to have a purpose for taking leave.

This is something I’ve always intellectually understood, but I only recently realised I never quite practised it. I took leave when I felt I’d earned my rest, such as after a productive few months or goals were met. And when I finally took leave, I needed my rest to be productive too, lest I “waste” my precious time off work.

But what if resting without a productivity-driven goal wasn’t a waste of time and was, in fact, liberating?

To many of us, especially people like me, this foreign concept takes some getting used to. But I want to learn to rest for its own sake, not because it will help me fulfill a great or meaningful purpose.

Taking leave could simply mean not having to set an alarm.

Grace Yeoh is a senior journalist with CNA.

1. The Right To Be Lazy

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 23 Duane Street, New York 1898 PAUL LAFARGUE (1841–1911) AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary

REVOLUTION IS AGAINST BOREDOM

Too much free time may be almost as bad as too little

Using excess discretionary time on productive activities can help bolster well-being, study says

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

As an individual’s free time increases, so does that person’s sense of well-being – but only up to a point. Too much free time can be also be a bad thing, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“People often complain about being too busy and express wanting more time. But is more time actually linked to greater happiness? We found that having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress and lower subjective well-being,” said Marissa Sharif, PhD, an assistant professor of marketing at The Wharton School and lead author of the paper. “However, while too little time is bad, having more time is not always better.”

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers analyzed the data from 21,736 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2012 and 2013. Participants provided a detailed account of what they did during the prior 24 hours -- indicating the time of day and duration of each activity – and reported their sense of well-being. The researchers found that as free time increased, so did well-being, but it leveled off at about two hours and began to decline after five. Correlations in both directions were statistically significant.

The researchers also analyzed data from 13,639 working Americans who participated in the National Study of the Changing Workforce between 1992 and 2008. Among the survey’s many questions, participants were asked about their amount of discretionary time (e.g., “On average, on days when you’re working, about how many hours [minutes] do you spend on your own free-time activities?”) and their subjective well-being, which was measured as life satisfaction (e.g., “All things considered, how do you feel about your life these days? Would you say you feel 1=very satisfied, 2=somewhat satisfied, 3=somewhat dissatisfied, or 4=very dissatisfied?”)

Once again, the researchers found that higher levels of free time were significantly associated with higher levels of well-being, but only up to a point. After that, excess free time was not associated with greater well-being.

To further investigate the phenomenon, the researchers conducted two online experiments involving more than 6,000 participants. In the first experiment, participants were asked to imagine having a given amount of discretionary time every day for at least six months. Participants were randomly assigned to have a low (15 minutes per day), moderate (3.5 hours per day), or high (7 hours per day) amount of discretionary time. Participants were asked to report the extent to which they would experience enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction.

Participants in both the low and high discretionary time groups reported lower well-being than the moderate discretionary time group. The researchers found that those with low discretionary time felt more stressed than those with a moderate amount, contributing to lower well-being, but those with high levels of free time felt less productive than those in the moderate group, leading them to also have lower well-being. 

In the second experiment, researchers looked at the potential role of productivity. Participants were asked to imagine having either a moderate (3.5 hours) or high (7 hours) amount of free time per day, but were also asked to imagine spending that time in either productive (e.g., working out, hobbies or running) or unproductive activities (e.g., watching television or using the computer). The researchers found participants with more free time reported lower levels of well-being when engaging in unproductive activities. However, when engaging in productive activities, those with more free time felt similar to those with a moderate amount of free time.   

“Though our investigation centered on the relationship between amount of discretionary time and subjective well-being, our additional exploration into how individuals spend their discretionary time proved revealing,” said Sharif. “Our findings suggest that ending up with entire days free to fill at one’s discretion may leave one similarly unhappy. People should instead strive for having a moderate amount of free time to spend how they want. In cases when people do find themselves with excessive amounts of discretionary time, such as retirement or having left a job, our results suggest these individuals would benefit from spending their newfound time with purpose.” 

Article: “Having Too Little or Too Much Time is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being,” by Marissa Sharif, PhD, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, and Cassie Mogilner, PhD, and Hal Hershfield, PhD, University of California Los Angeles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published online Sept. 9, 2021.

Contact: Marissa Sharif, PhD, can be reached via email at masharif@wharton.upenn.edu. 

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JOURNAL

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Having Too Little or Too Much Time is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2021

1. The Right To Be Lazy

   www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file

   The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …

2. The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library

3. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

4. 1. 2020-11-28 · Bob Black The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.

SCI-FI, UTOPIAS, AND SOCIALISM

We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?

Boris Strugatsky

01 September 2021

What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course: what is appealing to people today may not appeal to people in the future.

Dystopias

I have to confess, I am a sucker for sci-fi. And when it comes to sci-fi, I am omnivorous, reading and watching anything I can get my hands on. There is probably a hidden yearning for a better future in this passion, as I am particularly interested in the fiction about Earth-like worlds, especially those that are more developed than ours. But I have recently noticed an interesting feature of the vast majority of the sci-fi visions of the future: they are overwhelmingly dark, presenting rather a failed world than a successfully developed civilisation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or his post-World War II fascist America in The Man in the High Castle… Cyberpunk is a good example of a genre that produced enormous quantities of dark sci-fi works, and post-apocalyptic fiction writers have been prolific on this topic as well. Seems like the future people foresee in fiction as the most likely is not very bright at all. Beginnings like ‘after an ecological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity…’ or ‘It’s the future, and the planet is a dusty, radioactive wasteland…’ sound like a cliché in a film about the future. And technological breakthroughs gone horribly wrong are a really popular theme, with many examples brilliantly shown in the Black Mirror series.

Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?

There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.

While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.

Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.

I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’

‘Noon Universe’

There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.

The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.

The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common goodabsence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or militaryadvanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistanceeveryone is engaged in a profession that inspires them

This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competencea new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress

Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationalitythis society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning

Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.

SOURCE

This is the text of a talk given by Leon Rozanov at the SPGB Summer School in August 2021 and published in the September 2021 issue of The Socialist Standard.

THE SPACE-AGE COMMUNISM OF IVAN YEFREMOV

01 September 2021 

Ivan Yefremov (1907--1972) was by original profession a paleontologist. His first stories, on the life of explorers, were published in 1944. Andromeda -- in Russian-language editions The Andromeda Nebula -- is his best-known science fiction novel. Not coincidentally, it was written in 1956, the year of the first sputnik (Soviet artificial earth satellite).

This third English-language printing contains an introduction written shortly before the author's death. Here Yefremov explains how he came to write sci-fi and the purposes he thinks sci-fi should serve. For him sci-fi is not a light-hearted genre in which the fantasy is given free rein, but a serious medium for exploring new scientific ideas and their social implications. Its task is also to portray the communist future of mankind. (In this piece "communism" has the same meaning as in Soviet ideology: it refers to the future culmination of social development, NOT the historical forms of the Soviet system, which are called "socialism.")

Indeed, Andromeda is set in a society -- let's call it Yefremia for convenience -- in which communism is already a mature society, several centuries old. Poverty, greed, and heavy toil are things of the distant past; "knowledge and creative labor have freed Earth from hunger, overpopulation, infectious diseases, and harmful animals" (p. 181). A greatly reduced population is concentrated in a temperate zone, mainly around the Mediterranean Sea, between the intensely forested and cultivated (by automation) tropics and the newly wild prairie. An atmosphere is being created on Mars to prepare that planet too for human settlement. Space expeditions penetrate ever further into the galaxy, and the first contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations have been established. Yefremia fuses Marx' vision of earthly communism with Tsiolkovsky's vision of mankind's cosmic destiny. (1)

What of the people who inhabit this utopia? The Yefremians have a great deal of freedom: they travel at will, choose new professions, seek love relationships, initiate projects. At the same time, they are highly socially conscious and self-disciplined, even mildly ascetic. They derive satisfaction mainly from creative work in the arts and sciences and the full development of their intellectual and emotional capacities.

Coercion has not disappeared totally, as there is a small minority of egoistic throwbacks ("bulls"): they may be banished to the Island of Oblivion, or should they conspire to disrupt society eliminated by the "destroyer battalions." (I suppose something like the KGB is still needed to spot "bulls" and pre-empt their conspiracies, though this is nowhere spelt out.)

Yefremia was very much in tune with the spirit of the Khrushchev era, with its naive faith in rapid Soviet-led progress in two closely connected dimensions: scientific progress, symbolized by the new space program; and social progress -- "Our children will live under communism," promised Nikita Sergeyevich. Khrushchev's successors had no such faith and shifted the focus of official ideology from communism, relegated to an indefinitely distant future, to "actually existing socialism" (i.e. the Soviet status quo). In his 1972 introduction, Yefremov admits that many people no longer believe in a communist future. He still believes because the sole alternative is the self-destruction of mankind. The logic here goes as follows: Yes, A is highly implausible, but if not A then B, and B is simply too awful to contemplate, therefore A is inevitable.

How are decisions taken in Yefremia? One of the advantages of the fictional method of presenting utopias is that you never have to explain EXACTLY how they work. But we learn that leadership is shared among a number of councils: the Economic Council, the Astronautical Council, the Health Council, and so on. These councils are advised by an array of scientific institutions, my own favorites being the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge and the Academy of Sorrow and Joy.

The various councils cooperate on an equal basis: none is supposed to be subordinate to another. Yet the Economic Council does occupy a crucial niche, if only because "nothing big can be undertaken" unless it allocates the necessary resources. It is indeed "the planet's central brain." And there is also the Control of Honor and Justice, "the guardian of every person on the planet," the ultimate judicial authority. (2) Parallels with really existing socialism readily come to mind. However distant the future ostensibly being portrayed, many of the author's assumptions reflect the society in which he really lives. Of course, the one is supposed to be the precursor of the other.

While I have nothing against communism as such, I wouldn't want to live in Yefremia. There is too much tension and heroism for my taste; life is too strenuous -- physically, intellectually, emotionally. I prefer the gentler utopian visions of William Morris' "News from Nowhere" and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (in which an anarcho-communist society has been set up on the moon Anarres). Surely, once mankind gets past the unavoidable turmoil of class struggle, war and revolution and reaches mature communism it is entitled at long last to a bit of relaxation? After all, it was Marx' son-in-law Paul Lafargue who published a pamphlet entitled The Right To Be Lazy. Those of us who prefer the simple life can, it is true, go fishing on the Island of Oblivion, but in so doing we expose ourselves to abuse at the hands of the "bulls." Why can't we have an island of our own?

But Yefremov's workaholic ("strugglaholic" -- how's that for a neologism?) heroes and heroines have a grand excuse for not letting themselves relax: that cosmic destiny of mankind! The abundance of high-tech low-population communism is drained away by the exorbitant resource demands of ambitious cosmic projects. "We are going to ask mankind to curtail consumption for the year 809 of the Great Circle Era," says the president of the Astronautical Council (p. 330). Now where have we heard this before? No more enemies on earth, at least not to speak of? Never mind, let's go and fight mysterious beings in outer space. The struggle continues! Without end in sight. Space plays the same socially and esthetically conservative role in Yefremov's communism as did the arms race in actually existing socialism.

NOTES

(1) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857--1935). See pp. 258-281 in Russkii kosmizm [Russian Cosmism] (Moscow: Pedagogika-Press, 1993).

(2) Actually there are two Controls of Honor and Justice, one for the northern hemisphere and one for the southern. Each has 11 members. Cases concerning the whole planet are heard in joint session.

SOURCE

Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980). Translated by George Hanna. The book can be read on-line here or with multicolored illustrations here.

The day is dawning on a four-day work week

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream — and that includes a four-day work week. (Simon Abrams/Unsplash)

Karen Foster, Dalhousie University
Like any crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to rethink how we do things.
As we near the 100-day mark since the pandemic was declared, one area getting a significant attention is the workplace, where a window is opening for good ideas to move from the fringes to the mainstream.
For example, when millions more Canadians started working from home, many businesses were forced to experiment with telecommuting. Interestingly, many now say they’ll continue after the pandemic passes, because it benefits employers and employees alike.
Another idea, less widely tested than telecommuting, is generating buzz: the four-day work week. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the possibility of a shortened work week as a way to divvy up jobs, encourage local tourism, help with work-life balance and increase productivity.
As a sociologist who teaches about work and wrote a book about productivity, I believe she’s right.

Not a compressed schedule

A four-day work week must not be confused with a compressed schedule that has workers squeeze 37.5 to 40 hours of work into four days instead of five. For reasons that should be clearer below, that won’t help us now.
A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40. There are many reasons why this is appealing today: families are struggling to cover child care in the absence of daycares and schools; workplaces are trying to reduce the number of employees congregating in offices each day; and millions of people have lost their jobs.
A shorter work week could allow parents to cobble together child care, allow workplaces to stagger attendance and, theoretically, allow the available work to be divided among more people who need employment.

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Read more: A four-day working week could be the shot in the arm post-coronavirus tourism needs

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The most progressive shorter work week entails no salary reductions. This sounds crazy, but it rests on peer-reviewed research into shorter work weeks, which finds workers can be as productive in 30 hours as they are in 40, because they waste less time and are better-rested.

Most employees probably wouldn’t mind spending their own money on essentials provided at the office in exchange for a four-day work week. (Jasmin Sessler/Unsplash)

Shorter work weeks reduce the number of sick days taken, and on their extra day off, employees don’t use the office’s toilet paper or utilities, reducing their employer’s costs. Therefore, while it is counter-intuitive, it’s possible for people to work less at the same salary while improving their employer’s bottom line. That people might have to spend more of their own money on toilet paper is a concession most workers would probably accept.
The same body of research also has more predictable findings: people like working less.

Entrenched morality of work

If it makes this much sense, why don’t we have a four-day week already? It turns out this question is more than 150 years old.
Some of the answer pertains to the logistics involved in transforming our whole system of work, that’s not the entire answer. After all, the work week has been reduced before, so it can technically be done again.
The rest of the reason is rooted in capitalism and class struggle.
Thinkers from Paul Lafargue (“The Right to Be Lazy,” first published in 1883) to Bertrand Russell (“In Praise of Idleness,” from 1932) and Kathi Weeks (“The Problem with Work,” from 2012) have concluded we resist worktime reductions in the face of supportive evidence — and our own desires for more leisure — because of the entrenched morality of work and the resistance on the part of “the rich” to “the idea that the poor should have leisure,” in Russell’s words.
We are extremely attached to the idea that hard work is virtuous, idle hands are dangerous and people with more free time can’t be trusted.

Four-day work weeks floated in the 1930s

Nobody is suggesting evil governments conspire with evil bosses to keep powerless people busy. As historian Benjamin Hunnicutt has shown, there was significant interest in shorter work hours in the 1920s and 30s, when the 30-hour week was touted as a way to “share” the work among the Great Depression’s unemployed and underemployed citizens.

Henry Ford is seen in this 1919 photo. United States Library of Congress, CC BY

Even industrialists W. K. Kellogg and Henry Ford supported a six-hour day because they believed more rest would make for more productive workers. But Hunnicutt’s research in Work Without End reveals that some employers cut wages when they cut work hours, and when employees fought back, they dropped their demands for shorter work hours and focused instead on wage increases.
In the complex push and pull of capitalism, eventually even the New Deal, which influenced policy and discourse in Canada, shifted away from its early demands for more leisure toward demands for more work.
It’s quite possible we will do the same in our COVID-19 moment, and beg to be put back to work five days a week when this is all over.
But we have new reasons for considering shorter work weeks, and they might be more widely persuasive. It is also possible that we have finally given up on the false promise that working longer will translate into better lives. The four-day work week could be another wild idea that makes it through the pandemic’s open policy window.
Karen Foster, Associate Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.