Added: 140 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: World | 9 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/20119/Work-Is-The-Curse-Of-The-Drinking-Classes/'>"Work Is The Curse Of The Drinking Classes..."</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

Oscar Wilde, who is the author behind the title of this blog no doubt enjoyed his work and enjoyed a drink. But what about the rest of us? Huh? "Work..." you might say, "what's that all about?" Is it a necessary evil, does it give our lives shape, focus, direction and a reason to crawl out from the covers each morning? Or is it a bunch of ass that gets in the way of our drinking and good times? Do we do it just for money or is it what gives our lives purpose? Without working we'd have no industry, no food, no infrastructure, so of course it's necessary to any society, but what if you don't want to work. What if you just want to roll out of bed whenever the hell you like, smoke a joint and learn to play the sitar or walk the streets thinking idle thoughts. What's wrong with that? Or write a book, or recreate the battle of Stalingrad using Lego, or sit in your underwear drinking stale beer while seeing if you can telepathically communicate with your girlfriend? Well society won't allow it and will instead call you lazy/a bum/indolent/selfish/lethargic/bone idle/a student - delete as appropriate.

Although many people enjoy their jobs greatly and strive all their young-adult lives to get to where they are (And to those smug people, well done, pat yourselves on the back, you made it. Don't drown on your Cristal though.) - many don't. Work, for many, means getting up at an hour you don't want to and going to a place you don't like to work with people you hate who you wouldn't ordinarily associate with even if you were loved-up to the eyeballs on ecstasy, compassion and benevolence for all mankind, where licking the skin lesions of a rotting leper seems like the best idea in the world.

People will tell you it's all about finding a work/life balance. How about no work, all fun, is that an acceptable balance? Because even if you do a job you enjoy, like being a rock star or photographer for Penthouse, your talents will still be exploited and you'll still toil all the hours our nonexistent God sends. But there's only so many of those dream jobs to go around and if they're not taken through nepotism (which doesn't always mean the worst candidate for the job) or if you didn't study hard enough to get the required grades or certificates so our society can judge your worth or for some reason you locked horns with the school system and thus were left on the fringes or you're a talentless buffoon, then what? What do you do then? Cry? Get lost in the seas of life? Choose heroin? Or take a job in a factory and shut the f#ck up, or get some mindless office goon work and grease your way up the corporate ladder? F#ck that. If you don't want to work and instead choose to travel, bum around, be an artist or whatever, society shouldn't judge you or attach such a stigma to it.

Maybe they should teach idleness in schools along with all the other subjects, just so you get a choice. They could teach you how to while away whole afternoons by staring into space. Or how to f#ck up job interviews, and live cheaply but happily by ripping off those more fortunate. Maybe some people want to hang around for the rest of their lives doing whatever they please and if that means doing f#ck all: so be it. To live as an outsider, hold contempt for authority, whether that is the government or your boss. Be a maverick, read all day, drink all night, have fun all the time. Become an iconoclast, renounce society as we know it, and make your own definition of "work". Because you'd be in good company. Many great thinkers and writers, artists and poets were lazy bums and now they're canonised. We live in an age where work is considered the very pinnacle of human achievement, with an around-the-clock work culture that's fed by BlackBerrys and the blurring of work and personal life. Where you stand, career-wise, is where you stand socially.

The great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote his essay In Praise Of Idleness decrying the nobility of work way back in 1932, so this attitude against working so hard is nothing new. He knew the worth and value of laziness, as did Karl Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who wrote The Right To Be Lazy from his prison cell in 1883. If you can be assed, have a read.

Me, I can't be bothered to write any more. I'm going to go sit under a tree and wait for an apple to fall on my head, just to see what happens. Plus I'm phoning in sick tomorrow, so I'll see you at the beach. Bring some beer.

Added: 140 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: World | 9 Comments

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