How To Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson, examines “the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible”:
I wonder if that hard-working American rationalist and agent of industry Benjamin Franklin knew how much misery he would cause in the world when, back in 1757, high on puritanical zeal, he popularised and promoted the trite and patently untrue aphorism ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’?
A bit of history:
The English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid-18th century, work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did “jobs”, but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown.Take the weavers. Before the invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: “So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased,” he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition Of The Working Class In England. “They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed.”
Thompson writes: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did “sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening”. Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging. Thompson adds as an aside: “The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] —today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”