Idleness as resistance
August's Letter
In August, we explore idleness as a radical act of leisure. This letter is the first installment of the month’s series.
This letter is late, and I could say it was for a dozen responsible, adult reasons, but the truth is: I was seduced by idleness. That irresistible call to pause, to be still, exists in stark contrast to our world of perpetual motion.
It came like a soft whisper in the middle of the day, pulling me away from the screen. I lay down for what was meant to be a quick rest but turned into unanchored floating through the August’s afternoons, lost in thought and stillness. You know the kind I’m talking about: that soft space where time slips between the cracks of our daily duties and you find yourself staring out of a window, watching the light dance across the walls, thinking of nothing in particular, yet feeling something profound. Maybe it was this moment of stillness that led me to reflect on idleness itself. Or maybe it was the guilt, that uneasy sensation that lingered like an unwanted guest at the edge of a gathering, that whispers, "You should be doing something."
And yes, I feel the guilt. That old, familiar guilt, so hard to shake because it’s been ingrained in me for so long. The moment I slip into idleness, there’s that voice—the one that’s been planted in us by generations of women who had no choice but to work tirelessly—telling me I’m being lazy, selfish, wasting time. I’ve been conditioned to see myself as being whose worth is tied to productivity, care, and service. But let’s interrogate this: whose time am I wasting? And who taught me that idleness was something to be feared, rather than cherished?
Capitalism thrives on the commodification of our time
Silvia Federici, a feminist scholar, reminds us that the invisible labor women perform—domestic work, emotional caretaking, all the thankless tasks—has long been woven into the capitalist framework. We become gears in the machine, our time co-opted to serve others, often without pay or acknowledgment yet our worth tied to how much we can produce—whether that’s a clean house, a well-behaved child, or a flawless project at work. In this system, idleness isn’t just discouraged; it’s dangerous and feels like an act of betrayal. We’ve internalized the myth that every second must be accounted for, used to push some task forward, to care for someone, to create something. It’s painted as laziness, decadence, or irresponsibility, a betrayal of the virtues society has so carefully carved into us. Idleness becomes subversive because it is unaccounted for, uncommodified. This guilt is not ours; it’s the echo of centuries of conditioning, the residue of a society that’s built on the unpaid labor of women. And yet, we cling to this busyness, fearing that without it, we will dissolve into irrelevance. The guilt feels personal, but it’s profoundly political.
The history of this is layered. Men, for centuries, have been afforded the space to idle intellectually, philosophically, artistically—think of the café culture in 19th-century Paris, where men sat, smoked, and mused over ideas that would change the world. Meanwhile, women were expected to stay busy with their minds always tethered to the needs of others and domestic work, the kind that left no room for intellectual or creative wandering. We see this in the stories of so many women artists and writers, whose creativity was confined to the stolen moments between chores, between the needs of husbands and children. Virginia Woolf wrote of needing a room of one’s own—a physical space, but also a temporal one. Idleness carves out that room. It gives us the space to wander, to dream, to reconnect with parts of ourselves that we’ve buried under the demands of daily life. Even now, when we watch films or read books, how often do we see the trope of the creative male genius, lost in thought, while the women in his life spin around him, busy, dutiful?
Audre Lorde spoke to this when she emphasized the importance of self-care as an act of political resistance. She wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Idleness, then, is not just a personal act of rebellion against hustle culture; it is a radical act of reclaiming our time, energy, and autonomy. It is stepping outside the systems that have commodified our bodies and minds for centuries and saying: I refuse to be consumed.
Still, it's complicated, isn't it? That guilt that creeps in when we allow ourselves to linger in a moment of nothingness. The sense of inadequacy when we're not doing enough—whatever "enough" means. We may wander from one thought to the next, feeling the tug of our to-do lists on the edges of our consciousness. But here's a gentle truth: that guilt is not natural. It is learned. It is a product of centuries of conditioning, of gendered expectations that men could sit and think, create art, or contemplate philosophy, while we were expected to be busy, industrious, serving, nurturing. Men could afford to be idle in intellectual pursuits while women’s idleness was seen as laziness, as a failure of duty.
I believe there’s a quiet revolution happening
It doesn’t look like marches or chants or raised fists. It looks like stillness. Like a woman sitting alone in a park, her phone off, her gaze wandering towards the treetops. It looks like closing the laptop when there’s still work to be done. This revolution is idleness, and it’s a radical act of resistance—particularly for us women, who have been conditioned to be everything to everyone, but rarely to ourselves.
If we look to history, we find that idleness has often been the breeding ground for revolution, for creativity, for ideas that shape the world. In moments of pause, women have dreamed up new ways of thinking, of being.
But this resistance, this embracing of idleness, is not just about pushing back against capitalism or patriarchal structures. It is also about reconnecting with something deeper, something far older than the systems that bind us. When we allow ourselves to be idle, we reconnect with the natural rhythms of the world—we step into this slower, more cyclical flow. We reconnect with a sense of time that is not linear but circular and is measured in the soft fall of light at dusk, the quiet murmur of leaves, the slow ebb and flow of tides, the quiet bloom of flowers, the cyclical shapes of the moon.
The ecology of idleness teaches us that we, too, are part of this greater rhythm.
What if this was exactly what I needed, what we all need—a form of resistance against the relentless pace of life? Could idleness be more than indulgence?
So, today, I embrace idleness not as a shameful secret, but as a deliberate and necessary act of defiance.
August Gatherings
This month, as many of us are (hopefully) embracing idleness and enjoying the wind in our hair, we will pause our Tuesday morning journaling sessions. Let’s reconnect in September.
Great quote from Audre Lorde!