Hand Me that Loaf of Nothing
America’s gone and lost its knack for wasting time, and we’re paying a butcher’s bill for it.
Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together.
The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s high, and a sour malaise hangs over the land like smog over a dying mill town.
I used to ride my kids, my girls in particular, for making “hanging out” their religion. In my buttoned-up, left-hemispheric world, idleness was a sin, a pointless frittering of hours that could be spent climbing a ladder to nowhere. Purpose was king, and loafing was a pauper’s game.
I was dead wrong.
It’s precisely because hanging out serves no purpose that it’s the lifeblood of being human.
Deep down, I knew it all along.
I’d read James Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs and nodded along with its praise of leisure, so I wasn’t a complete tyrant about my daughters’ social loafing. Still, I’d nudge my kids to shove socializing down the priority list, below chores, homework, and the endless hustle of our mechanized age.
Mistake.
In this left-hemispheric madhouse we call a culture, kicking back with friends ain’t just a luxury.
It’s a rebellion. A glorious rebellion.
Read the rest
America’s gone and lost its knack for wasting time, and we’re paying a butcher’s bill for it.
Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together.
The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s high, and a sour malaise hangs over the land like smog over a dying mill town.
I used to ride my kids, my girls in particular, for making “hanging out” their religion. In my buttoned-up, left-hemispheric world, idleness was a sin, a pointless frittering of hours that could be spent climbing a ladder to nowhere. Purpose was king, and loafing was a pauper’s game.
I was dead wrong.
It’s precisely because hanging out serves no purpose that it’s the lifeblood of being human.
Deep down, I knew it all along.
I’d read James Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs and nodded along with its praise of leisure, so I wasn’t a complete tyrant about my daughters’ social loafing. Still, I’d nudge my kids to shove socializing down the priority list, below chores, homework, and the endless hustle of our mechanized age.
Mistake.
In this left-hemispheric madhouse we call a culture, kicking back with friends ain’t just a luxury.
It’s a rebellion. A glorious rebellion.
Read the rest
Eric Scheske
