It is that time of the year, when all journalists will be sticking the microphone to people’s mouths while walking down Republic Street, grilling them on New Year’s resolutions.

I am a resolutions snob. I hate them. They’re there, waiting to be broken. They stress me out. Even listening to people listing their targets for the coming year tires me out. Enough already, I want to say, here come and sit down and share a Talisker instead.

So, I have a cunning plan today for all those of you who have 2014 in flashing neon lights beckoning them to self-inflict unreachable goals.

Get a piece of paper and jot down the following resolutions: eat, sleep, read.

In short, in 2014, be idle. Because the world over, wise people are recommending it.

In America, the big wig entrepreneur Brian Halligan told the New York Times: “I have this new initiative in my life where I want to work less and think more.”

In Britain, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs told The Guardian that he had never sent an e-mail or browsed the web. His scientific breakthroughs, he said, came as a result of “peace and quiet”.

In Malta, my fellow columnist and social anthropologist, Mark Anthony Falzon, urged 2013’s batch of graduates to sit down, smoke a pipe and embrace idleness: “Invest in idle leisure at the expense of work,” he said in a speech worthy of a standing ovation, albeit the education, economy and investment ministers are said to have fainted on the spot.

The thing is that only when you indulge in moments of idleness can you be a creative free spirit. The ancient Greek word schole, which turned into our word for school, originally meant free time.

In this time when we have been stamped with the title of least cultural people in the EU (we are the nation least likely to sing and dance – how sad is that?), we need to find Athenian sense of the importance of cultivated libertas.

Get a piece of paper and jot down the following resolutions: eat, sleep, read

In the moments when we are eating (and drinking), sleeping (and other, ahem, bed activities) and reading (and staring into nothing), our brain is having a break. Even science backs this theory: neuroscientists say that when the mind is idle, it naturally wanders through grocery lists, rehashes conversations, just generally daydreams, and then that’s the time when ideas start falling into place and when opinions are formed.

Take this column, for example: it takes me a week to write it; 20 per cent of the time is lunching/dining/coffeeing with my friends and I’ll be happily taking mental notes, and then they go and spoil it all by turning round and saying: “You’re not to write about this”; 10 per cent is spent reading stuff that has nothing to do with anything; and 60 per cent is sitting on the toilet (lid closed) staring into empty space. Only 10 per cent of the time is the actual writing of it.

And this is the process by which I have concluded we are being brainwashed by our authorities. All throughout the year, all we hear is politicians’ talk about rewarding bżulija (hard work), or slogans promising new measures for “hardworking people”. It’s all to ingrain in us that hard work is the proper way of living one’s life, ergo, if you’re idle, you’ll be poor or in cahoots with the devil.

David Spencer, British professor of political economy, says this obsession with hard work is a dangerous distraction from the other areas of life that matter to our well-being.

“Working hard to earn a living need not be seen as a good thing if it means enduring long hours of drudgery, long hours away from one’s family and friends,” he says.

In fact, if we go back to life in pre-capitalist times, it was infinitely more leisurely and less pressurised; people worked much more irregularly and enjoyed extended periods of free time.

Then came capitalism and work ethic became the in thing. John Keynes, the 19th-century economist had predicted that thanks to this approach, we’d all be working 15 hours. Has a prediction ever gone so wrong?

You can never have a job so tasking that you don’t find time for mindless leisure. Every now and then, I get texts from friends of mine with ultra-hectic jobs saying: I’m on the sofa, dog curled up next to me; Cancelled the meeting, decided to stay in bed and finish Mandela’s book; Smoking a quiet pipe. Wrapped up in a cloud of delightful intoxication, but thinking.

It is my strong belief that when we have time to process life, we feel better. It allows us to comprehend and box carefully the painful moments, the tears, the bruises of the soul. And it gives us the time to treasure the beautiful moments, the laughter, that special kiss.

I could go on, but the armchair is beckoning. And so is yours.

Happy New Year.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti