W e tend to position work against a series of opposites. Some of these are lauded, or at least tolerated: leisure, play, meditation, contemplation, rest. But one of the antonyms of work is, in most accounts, something of more dubious value: idleness. Apathy and a lack of care; laziness and slothfulness and inaction; indolence and shiftlessness; sluggishness. The synonyms are plentiful, and they take us from stasis and immobility to slow, languorous movement, and from a distracted kind of absent-mindedness to undirected activity with no set intentions. The expenditure of energy with no identifiable benefit, as in a car idling, or the dispersal of thought with no specific direction, as in idle daydreaming. In all these versions, idleness is something for upstanding citizens and responsible adults to studiously avoid.
Exhortations toward work as the path to truth, meaning, virtue, and salvation suggest the contemporary valuation of work is—although not universal—more than the legacy of a single cultural tradition. In the Greek poet Hesiod’s epic poem Works and Days, written in the eighth century BC, we learn, “When you work, you will be much better loved by the gods.” Even in the Garden of Eden, “where there was no neede of labour,” we are told by the English rector John Sakeld in the 1600s, “God would not have man idle.” It wasn’t a material imperative but a spiritual one, something existential. This was not just a Judeo-Christian tradition: work was also “the Way” for seekers of enlightenment in Japan in the 1300s. As explained by the monk and poet Kenkō, “it is a wicked thing to allow the smallest parcel of land to lie idle.” He listed the things that should be planted—food and medicine—as he recounted the teachings of a lay priest who chastised him for his unkempt garden, urging more productive uses of the land.
