I still have a lot to learn about being lazy

"I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like."  Emile Henry Gauvreay

I'm reading this book called Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz. He mentioned this group called CLAWS, an acronym for Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery, and a website called WhyWork.org. These are my people! However I am finding out that the founders of these amazing movements have moved on to other things. They were onto this quite a few years before me! I want to get in touch with them! And I also found out how much more research and reading I need/want to do on the history and evolution of the leisure lifestyle. On the whywork.org site, they have a ton of interesting-looking books that I will be reading soon. 

How do I put all this together into something I can design to help you take more leisure time? I struggle with the continuity between the line I quoted above and wanting to make things for people to buy. It's tricky. I'm well aware that there may be a conflict there. I am very open to feedback on this. 

Here is a paint-by-number project I did the other afternoon. I got it at MOMA. I'm thinking of making paint-by-number projects as part of Leisure Society's products. 

How I came to be idle

Where was I? Oh yeah, my life of leisure. I took the entire summer off last year. I hadn't done that since freshman year of college. Even in high school I worked all weekend at Brooks Pharmacy. I needed to detox from work, from fashion, from the L train, from the constant bombardment of noise and people. I wanted to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life. I realize now that I should've started this blog back then to chronicle my adventures real-time, but oh well. 

I started doing things that I wanted to do, for no other reason than my own enjoyment. I went to the beach a few times a week, taking the LIRR from Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn. I read tons of books, a few a week. I started cooking more. I spent a lot of time in my own company, which I felt I desperately needed to do in order to locate Christina again. I know that sounds really hokey, "I needed to find myself, dude", but it's sort of true. I felt I had lost my SELF in that world of go, go, go and do more, sell more, make more $$. The way I believed I could find my way back to myself was to literally do nothing. One of my old therapists taught me a great slogan or mantra, "When in doubt, do nothing." I knew I needed to be still and quiet, and listen for my own tiny little inner voice to make herself known again. I really tried to keep an open mind, and not have any preconceived notions of what I should do next.

Now this was not easy by any means. I suffered from guilt almost every day. Guilt about not working, fear that everyone thought I was a "slacker". I always hated slackers, mostly because I was envious I think. I was playing every day, going to the beach with my boogie board in the morning when everyone else was going off to work. Ha ha. Suckers! But after a while I felt a new pride when people asked me what I had been doing. "Nothing, " I would answer. It made more than a few people angry and confused. 

But doing nothing, to me, doesn't always mean staring into space dreaming. Although that is a big part of it. I was doing lots of things, I just wasn't working at a job or career. I started studying Italian, which I had always wanted to do because my great-grandparents were from Italy. I never would've been able to commit to taking a class when I was working! Leaving at 6:00 (the supposed quittin' time) was impossible with all the work and meetings. It was also frowned upon. If you left at 6:00, or Heaven forbid before that, your good-byes would be met with "Must be nice." The people would talk about you and say that you did nothing and left early all the time. 

Anyway, back to happier times....part of my doing nothing is studying, learning, attending classes, thinking. So I made a new commitment to keep taking classes. I'll leave you with a list of other things I enjoy under the umbrella of doing nothing. 

Paint by numbers, crossword puzzles, cooking, dinner parties, board games, listening to music, taking baths, playing guitar hero, knitting, reading, volunteering, croquet, gardening, puzzles, sleeping.....

I'll try to explain more about Leisure Society, the company, next time. Im figuring it out as I go along.