The Art of Loafing

America’s gone and lost its knack for wasting time, and we’re paying a butcher’s bill for it.

Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together.

The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s high, and a sour malaise hangs over the land like smog over a dying mill town.

I used to ride my kids, my girls in particular, for making “hanging out” their religion. In my buttoned-up, left-hemispheric world, idleness was a sin, a pointless frittering of hours that could be spent climbing a ladder to nowhere. Purpose was king, and loafing was a pauper’s game.

I was dead wrong.

It’s precisely because hanging out serves no purpose that it’s the lifeblood of being human.

Deep down, I knew it all along.

I’d read James Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs and nodded along with its praise of leisure, so I wasn’t a complete tyrant about my daughters’ social loafing. Still, I’d nudge my kids to shove socializing down the priority list, below chores, homework, and the endless hustle of our mechanized age.

Mistake.

In this left-hemispheric madhouse we call a culture, kicking back with friends ain’t just a luxury.

It’s a rebellion. A glorious rebellion.

Friends are, in the left-hemisphere calculation of things, gloriously useless. True friends aren’t tools to be wielded or cogs to be slotted into some grand scheme, so they’re a middle finger to the left brain’s obsession with control, with turning every human bond into a transaction. If you’re out there “networking” like some soulless LinkedIn drone posing at a cocktail party, you’re betraying the species, pulling what T.S. Eliot called the “greatest treason”: doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

The left hemisphere’s a bully, always scheming to box up your soul in its spreadsheets and algorithms. You gotta slap it down, and often. That’s counter-conduct: anything that beats down the left hemisphere.

Flourishing is its partner. It’s conduct that builds up the right hemisphere.

Those messy, unquantifiable moments of laughter, shared silences, or just shooting the breeze on a sagging porch? It’s both counter-conduct and flourishing.

And it ain’t hard. Grab a couple pals, crack a beer, and let the world spin without you for a spell.