Can you please invite me to your Western society that celebrates idleness?
In my Western society, we spend the first 22 years of our lives training to work for another 40 years before we can comfortably enter "idleness" at around age 65 for most people.
I think that for a long time "idleness" is stigmatized as "uselessness", and that by doing nothing you are not contributing to the wellbeing of the colony/civilization/society. That's likely even more true for a burgeoning settlement or young country, but still true today in almost every culture in the world.
You don't need an invitation to visit Western Europe, but I'd wait a few months.
The kinds of greeks and romans who wrote stuff down that people kept were into σχολή and otium, respectively.
a sixteenth century telling of an anecdote from about a millennium earlier: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k70135b/f1013.image.r=...
> "Eſope vit ſon maiſtre qui piſſoit en ſe promenant, quoy donq, fit-il, nous faudra-il chier en courant."
You will for certain be questioned on it, and even then it seems you're considered a low quality candidate even if you have a reasonable explanation.
With 12 months or more, it's guaranteed to be a major topic during your interview process, and even afterwards it can derail job offers and require even more discussion about it.
Pre-civilization peoples (if by civilization we mean agriculture and settlements) seem to have worked even less.
Idleness is great for us self-entertaining solitary autodidacts, but that's not true of most people!
> It seems today that Western society's whole goal is to increase our option for idleness.
... in a consumerist context. Although the internet has hugely expanded the options for non-bored non-transactional idling.
Prior to the media age, the main thing idleness led to was drinking.
And people who are themselves working hard find it hard to tolerate seeing people who aren't. This drives all sorts of ridiculous behavior, like office presenteeism.
Western society doesn’t increase idleness options. It actively discourages idleness by giving you ever simpler ways to use up every cycle.
Idleness leads to thinking, which tends to lead to people testing their cages.
I think it has more to do with the fact that you'd otherwise starve to death. There was no wholefoods to trade food stamps in. Also preindustrial probably any man hour had to be useful.
While today it costs next to nothing for us to feed the homeless, then it would have been almost as expensive as hiring them.
Although if food grows easily, you might expect the number of humans around to grow to catch up with it... and this mostly didn't happen (in the pre-industrial world) not because there wasn't enough time (exponentials are fast!) but because it ran into other limits, like disease.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
I don’t have a reference handy but during this time and several centuries thereafter there were (enforced) laws that sought to prohibit what we’d now call tramps throughout the English countryside. It appears that that is one part of home that they’re trying to leave behind.
It sounds to me as a way to prevent associated societal problems, real or otherwise: criminality, alcohol abuse, homelessness
In today’s context we read being idle as leisure time - and we have way more options to be idle with games and movies while still having a nice life with food and safety for everyone
Back then bring idle might simply mean being one step away from moving to the woods and stealing from the rich like Robin hood
A slightly more modern example—Iceland had a problem with misbehaving youth that they essentially solved by eliminating opportunities for idleness and strongly encouraging them to be in structured activity at most possible times.
Maybe? In this context, I mainly interpret it as being unemployed. In other words, you are meant to go out, do some work, earn your keep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351 , and the one from 1349
Idleness and failure to contribute to the state was seen to be a fatal flaw. It also predates the protestant/catholic dichotomy stereotype of hard working wasps vs. mercantile catholics