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> “There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren, keep truc
by nnq 12y ago
> “There is so much to learn and produce and improve that we should not spend more than a dribble of time living as if we were in Eden. Grandchildren, keep trucking.” - Richard Freeman, of Harvard
...somebody shoot this guy. Please.
When will we realize that so many great thought were thought because smart people have had free time to "let their minds wonder around". Think Darwin, the leisure-class naturalist with lots of time to travel, and the theory of evolution. Think Einstein, the underachiever working in a patent office with too much free time to think and the theory of relativity. Who will have time to integrate all the knowledge that we "mine" into useful theories, when we've build a society where the smarter we are, the less time to think you have?!
This became obvious since the '30s, when Bertrand Russel realized the direction we were heading (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html), despite the fact that thinking about such things was not his job, and most likely because at that point in his life he had a lot of free time to think around. As opposed to Keynes, whose job was to think at this, but was probably to "busy" to see the big picture and totally ignore the "red queen effect" of consumerism.
EDIT+: oops, I always forget that Americans can take any invitation to violence seriously :) I toned it down a bit.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hoggle 12y agoThat was exactly what I needed at the moment, thanks for sharing "In Praise of Idleness". Brainwashed as I am I keep thinking that I need to shake the slave mentality and focus my life on leisure time to ultimately become more productive of course.
- Litost 12y agoThank you, thank you. That Bertrand Russel link is simultaneously one of the funniest and most poignant things i've read in quite a while. Always seemed odd, this keep everyone so busy working (and consuming), they won't have the time or the inclination to question the reason they're spending so much of their time working. And your observation about smart people having free time, links into this recent article about Peter Higgs (of Higgs Boson fame) saying "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...)