It doesn't take much these days to be considered "formal."

I'm reading "Think It’s Cool to Wear Fancy Sneakers to Work? You Might Be Old. After years of office casual, young people are embracing loafers, derbies and oxfords" (NYT gift link).

Earlier this year, Esquire described the trend as the loafer’s “big generational shift,” describing how younger consumers “were bypassing sneakers in growing numbers.” And in January, The Times UK deemed 2026 “the year of the loafer.”...

The surging interest in formal footwear fashions has simultaneously been a boon for both high-end luxury retailers and heritage brands with classic shoe offerings, like Allen Edmonds, the Wisconsin-based retailer. Nick Wooster, the brand’s consulting creative director, said that they have “absolutely” seen a recent increase in interest in their handmade leather loafers and derbies among younger customers. 

Even sneaker brands are trying to be more dressy.

"Evolution shaped humans to rest—and to run only when absolutely necessary."

I'm reading "Born to Rest: Why Exercise is Hard" (Harvard Magazine, August 9, 2016).

[Daniel] Lieberman, Lerner professor of biological sciences, says that humans have... been selected to exercise only as much as they must to survive. The ancestors of modern humans lived as hunter-gatherers. In this subsistence lifestyle, food was often scarce, so resting was key to conserving energy for survival and reproduction. In other words, humans were born to run— but as little as possible.

“No hunter-gatherer goes out for a jog, just for the sake of it, I can tell you from personal experience,” says Lieberman. “They go out to forage, they go out to work, but anything else would be unwise, not to mention maladaptive” in calorie-restricted environments.

So I am thinking that if you are idle and thinking of yourself as lazy, lethargic, sedentary, or even deserving of a diagnosis of pathological demand avoidance, think again. You may be the most authentically human of human beings, closer to what nature designed. 

"Who’s ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create? Could it be that in this passivity, I shall find my freedom?"

Says the character identified as "Dostoyevsky Wannabe" in the credits to the sublime 1991 film "Slacker," quoted in a Daily Texan article, "Linklater’s Austin, 35 Years Later."

I've watched that movie many times, but not in the last 10 years. I should watch again. I think it might feel like scrolling in TikTok, which could elevate scrolling in TikTok and maybe explain why, on any given day, I'd rather scroll in TikTok than watch a movie on television. I like the fragmentation!

"The Teddy [bear] craze was followed by a moral panic, as crazes involving kids inevitably are."

"Students in a New York University sewing class were forbidden to make Teddy bears, lest they 'breed idleness among children.' A Catholic priest in Michigan went further, preaching that if little white girls were allowed to play with 'the horrible monstrosity' instead of dolls, they would fail to develop their maternal instincts and doom the race to suicide...."

From "The Race to Give Every Child a Toy/For most of history, parents couldn’t buy their kids dolls, action figures, or the like. Then playtime became big business" (The New Yorker).

Before the Teddy bear, the toy market did not exist in the sense that it does now. For much of the nineteenth century, dolls were made at home from corn husks, clothing scraps, and the like, or produced from expensive, fragile bisque porcelain and kept high up on shelves to be admired by grownup collectors, not pawed by clumsy kids. Most children had marbles, hoops, balls, and little else. Few people bought toys from stores. The success of the Teddy bear changed that...

Here's the book under discussion: "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (commission earned).

"'I just felt like I lost my inner compass,' said [Isabel] Falls, 27, who was working as a design researcher at the time and missed being closer to nature."

"'I wanted to feel a bit more like I was alive and living,' she said. She turned her attention to building up her savings and quit her job in May 2023 to take a year off. 'It’s a huge privilege to have been able to do it, and I really recognize that'....  Almost two years later, Ms. Falls is in Mexico... and working on a freelance basis for a travel agency. The flexibility of the job was enticing...  Most of her belongings are still in a shed at her mother’s house in Washington State.... 'I’m not in the mind-set of, "Let me grind as hard as I can right now so that I can retire at 55," or whatever... I can work and I can make money and I can save, and I can also live my life now.... I’m still trying to do what makes me happy rather than being in the grind of it all."

I'm reading "To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’Some young people are spending their savings on an extended break earlier in their careers rather than waiting until retirement" (NYT).

I've also been reading Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel "Dharma Bums" — full text at link — and I've been looking for a place to quote this paragraph:

"My favorite part of Dead Week is getting up early, drinking coffee, and looking ahead to the long stretch of nothingness that fills the day."

"The nothingness doesn’t have to be slothful; sometimes I leave the house and sometimes I don’t, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. If I don’t go outside, I don’t feel bad about it, and if I do, everybody else I encounter looks equally confused and at loose ends, frittering away these leftover days. It is the only time of year when the days feel slow to me, when the time outside of whatever tasks I have to do does not somehow vanish into further worry and busyness. It is the only time I don’t feel like I am perpetually late to my own life...."

Writes Helena Fitzgerald, in "All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year/The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is a time when nothing counts, and when nothing is quite real" (The Atlantic).

The author "is a writer based… in New York." I presume that means New York City, and not just because I know it is the convention in New York to say "New York" for New York City and to specify "New York State" if you mean to refer to the state. There's no other state where people add "State" to the state's name. Imagine if in Oklahoma, you said "Oklahoma State" to signal that you didn't mean Oklahoma City. Anyway, I know that means New York City because the people on the street have a distinct look of being off from work. If the author goes outside she's struck by everyone looking at loose ends. New York City is such a workplace.

Anyway, for me, out here in Madison, Wisconsin, every day is the equivalent of a day in Fitzgerald's "Dead Week."

"I used to seek remarkable sites, events and people. Now I notice more supposedly unremarkable moments..."

"... which as it turns out are why we are here.... Dew, stars, Neal’s apricot tea roses — variations on a theme of sparkle.... On any unremarkable day, there will be a number of what Neal and I call Alzheimer-y moments, more and more — some funny, some scary.... The fear of missing out has lessened greatly. In its place, we have the fear of being pressured into gatherings we don’t want to go to. Luckily, at 65, along with your Social Security check, you earn the courage to beg off: 'It sounds lovely, but I have other plans,' those plans being to stay in, eat popcorn and settle into the current TV binge. Saying no to things that deplete or bore us becomes an essential skill. To me, nothing is more wonderful than to crawl between the sheets again, with a book and the cat, and to say our prayer: 'Oh, well.'..."

Writes Anne Lamott in "Living for the unremarkable moments/Age grants us permission to be curious about every ordinary day" (WaPo).

It was nice to run across that right after seeing these 2 articles: 1. "Popular tourist spot is 'total chaos' with cars stuck in 4-hour traffic jam: 'Horrific experience'" (NY Post)("The people who work in the Fairy Pools car park have said visitors say it’s like a warzone driving there"), and 2. "Was This the Summer European Tourism Reached a Breaking Point?/Overwhelmed destinations made high-season visitors the targets of a major tourism backlash" (NYT)("Protesters staging hunger strikes against tourism developments. Local officials threatening to cut off water to illegal vacation rentals. Residents spraying tourists with water pistols").

"When classes were virtual, students would log on some days, and some days they wouldn’t.... For parents, it might seem easier that way."

"No dragging kids out of bed before daybreak. No wrestling them into proper clothes. No getting them to the bus stop as one’s own work waited. 'You were able to just do the things you needed to do,' Johnson said. 'Everybody was comfortable. It was, "I can go to my computer, my baby is in my room on the computer. We’re good."' After that hiatus, relearning old behaviors was hard. 'If I were a child, and I could stay at home on my computer, in my room, and play with my little toys on the side, pick up the game for your break or lunchtime, how hard is it to sit in a school building for seven hours?' she said. 'It takes us to help build those habits, and I don’t think just one person can do it alone.' Some parents, unimpressed by what instruction consisted of during remote learning, didn’t see missing school as that consequential. Some simply liked having their kids around."

Writes Alec MacGillis, in "Has School Become Optional? In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun" (The New Yorker).

"Johnson" = Shepria Johnson, employed by Concentric Education Solutions, which contracts with school districts to make home visits to families with truant children. 

Interesting detail: "Concentric hired dozens of employees, many of them young Black college graduates. It gave them two weeks of training, which included instruction as basic as how to knock on doors. 'I tell everyone, "Knock a little harder, but don’t knock like the police,"' a Concentric manager said."

"Perhaps the portrayal of Black idleness will always be, if not haunted, then framed by a broader context that makes it seem like an act of resistance rather than a simple fact of life."

"'When we talk about Black people and time,' [one curator] says, 'we’re talking about stolen labor, stolen time—and each of these images steals it back.'... [The curators] show that Black people around the world have been reposing, alone and in each other’s arms, for a long time...."

Writes Emily Lordi, in "The Visual Power of Black Rest/Black people are generally pictured as doing anything but relaxing—as being attacked, or agitating, or performing. The Black Rest Project aims to widen the lens" (The New Yorker).

"The show is part of a broader initiative called the Black Rest Project... [which] will explore the complexities of rest for Black people, and challenge the binary assumption that one can either slow down or make a living, can either struggle or sleep (a myth encoded in the activist mandate to 'stay woke')."

"I grew up in South Korea, where there are two words that can roughly translate as 'laziness': geeureum and gwichaneum."

"Geeureum’s connotations are more or less identical to the English—the word bears the same condescension. But gwichaneum lacks the negative valence. There’s even a kind of jest to it. To feel gwichan... is to not be bothered to do something, not like it, or find it to be too much effort. The key to understanding the term, however, is how it fits into Korean grammar: You can’t say 'Bob is a gwichan person'; you can only say something like 'Doing laundry is a gwichan endeavor for Bob.' The term describes tasks, not people. It places the defect within the act. Errands that are gwichan induce laziness in you.... Gwichan nails what’s wrong with the litany of errands that plague our everyday existence: Many of them don’t merit our devotion.... Gwichanism (a popular neologism in Korea) is not an apologia for anti-productivity or anti-work, and the gwichanist will still fulfill their vital life obligations. You see, gwichanists aren’t unproductive; they’re perhaps meta-productive, interrogating the merit of every undertaking.... [E]mbracing gwichanism allows me to assert the primacy of my preferences, however esoteric...."

Writes Sheon Han in "The Case for Selective Slackerism/How a Korean term helps me reconcile my moments of discipline and sloth" (The Atlantic).

In this view, as I understand it, it's not that you avoid all chores. It's that you differentiate among chores and you view the chores as the source of the laziness. It's interesting to think of the activity itself as producing the feeling and to relieve yourself of a moral burden in feeling lazy.

Is English lacking the words for this distinction between 2 types of laziness? I can see that I have a tag for "laziness" and a separate — and important! — tag for "idleness." There are also many English words in the general area: "apathy," "inertia," "lethargy," "sluggishness," "sloth," "lassitude," "loafing" (I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease...)....

But perhaps none of these words expresses the difference between the general resistance to work and the resistance only to a particular type of work. And yet, let me suggest "irksome." We speak of the "irksome task." That does seem to blame the task itself and not our own laziness. It makes sense, in English, to say I am not a lazy person, but that is an irksome task.

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

"After opening the choice of Word of the Year up to English speakers for the first time in its history, over the last two weeks more than 300,000 people cast their vote.... And the winner is... Goblin mode."

"‘Goblin mode’ – a slang term, often used in the expressions ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – is ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.’ Although first seen on Twitter in 2009, goblin mode went viral on social media in February 2022, quickly making its way into newspapers and magazines after being tweeted in a mocked-up headline. The term then rose in popularity over the months following as Covid lockdown restrictions eased in many countries and people ventured out of their homes more regularly. Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’, or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media...."

So says Oxford Languages (the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary).

Sample quote from The Guardian: “Goblin mode is like when you wake up at 2am and shuffle into the kitchen wearing nothing but a long t-shirt to make a weird snack, like melted cheese on saltines.” 

Here's an Axios article from last April: "Musk's 'goblin mode' is here to stay":

"I don’t want to be a girlboss. I don’t want to hustle. I simply want to live my life slowly and lay down in a bed of moss with my lover and..."

"... enjoy the rest of my existence reading books, creating art and loving myself and the people in my life."

Said some woman on TikTok, quoted by Jessica Bennett in "The Worst Midnight Email From the Boss, Ever" (NYT). 

Bennett — who hates that Elon Musk email telling workers to be "hard core" — concurs:

Honestly, yes. “Hard core” is a bygone era of management... [W]e’ve now got plenty of other, soft-core interests to replace it. How about a workplace modeled on cottagecore, in which we just flutter around in forests and forage for mushrooms instead of hovering over Slack? Or cabincore, in which we huddle in cozy flannel (comfycore) in front of a fireplace instead of being warmed by the glow of our screens?...

Maybe what we are witnessing with Twitter’s mass exodus — and the general antiwork sentiment in general — is a labor revolt “in real time,” as one Twitter user put it....

I'm so glad I have a "moss" tag to use for this... especially since, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Meade came in and announced that the moss he'd planted for me last summer was taking hold. And he saw a mouse on the moss — a moss mouse. How cottagecore is that?!

"What do you do when neither spouse is happy with the working and income-generating grind?"

"My husband and I had an agreement that when each of our children were born, I would take my maternity leave and then he would take a leave of similar length when I returned to work. We are finding now, after the arrival of our second baby, that neither of us wants to go back. I earn more money, and thus I have to return to work, but I am equally unhappy with the weekly grind...."

From a letter to the WaPo advice columnist.

This shows that the perverse privilege inherent in systematically paying women less. It preserves the traditional structure of man out in the world, woman in the home.

What can you say to this woman except welcome to reality? Well, I'd say that it doesn't have to be the higher earner who goes to work. Who has the more satisfying job? Who has the job that makes a greater contribution to the world? Maybe at some point, you'll hit upon the factors that let the wife have her wish of avoiding the difficulties of work.

Also, consider that you might also not be happy with the childcare "grind." It's all grind when you have a bad attitude, isn't it?

"Rather than working late on a Friday evening, organising the annual team-building trip to Slough or volunteering to supervise the boss’s teenager on work experience..."

"... the quiet quitters are avoiding the above and beyond, the hustle culture mentality, or what psychologists call 'occupational citizenship behaviours.'... TikTok posts about quiet quitting may have been inspired by Chinese social media: #TangPing, or lying flat, is a now-censored hashtag apparently prompted by China’s shrinking workforce and long-hours culture.... 'The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking "What should work mean for me? How can I do a role that’s more aligned to my values?"'"

From "Quiet quitting: why doing the bare minimum at work has gone global/The meaninglessness of modern work – and the pandemic – has led many to question their approach to their jobs" (The Guardian). 

I blogged about quiet quitting 2 weeks ago, here. And I blogged about tangping in June 2021, here. And click my tag "idleness" for various manifestations of my interest in this concept over the years — my blogging years. 

But I've been interested in it for as long as I remember. The Guardian article mentions "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which had a big impact on me when I was a high school student. Talk about a quiet quitter! 

Somewhat noisier examples from my high school English classes that got into my head: "Walden" and "The World Is Too Much With Us":

"Mark Zuckerberg failed to conceal his annoyance with an employee who asked about vacation days during a meeting in which the Meta CEO revealed plans to cut underperforming workers..."

"During a companywide Q&A meeting on June 30... Zuckerberg reportedly 'appeared visibly frustrated' after one Chicago-based employee asked whether 'Meta Days,' or extra time off introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, would continue in 2023. 'Um … all right,' Zuckerberg said after hearing the pre-recorded question.... 'Given my tone in the rest of the Q&A, you can probably imagine what my reaction to this is.'"

From "Mark Zuckerberg ‘visibly frustrated’ over worker’s vacation question: report" (NY Post).

I would refer the Chicago-based employee to the concept of "quiet quitting." You're doing the polar opposite — noisy clinging. 

Quiet quitting.

"I recently learned about this term called ‘quiet quitting,’ where you’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You’re still performing your duties but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not, and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."

That's from this TikTok video.

A comment on the video: "I quiet quit 6 months ago and guess what, same pay. same recognition, same everything but less stress."

And: "Then when you do it you realize nothing at work matters and suddenly all the stress vanishes."

This reminds me of an old song I was listening to yesterday:

"He talks a bit about famous customers he’s served, including Patti Smith, who shares his fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays."

"Philip Larkin would come in, looking for first editions of his own books. He sold a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' to Johnny Depp, who was 'trying incredibly hard not to be recognized and with predictably comic results.'"

From "Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave./In his grouchy, funny memoir, 'A Factotum in the Book Trade,' Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more" (NYT).

The review is by Dwight Garner — note: "garner" is fine as a name! — and the reason Kociejowski would like you to leave — if you walk into his store and say "I love the smell of old books" — is that a thousand people have walked into the store and said the same damned thing.

The Robert Louis Stevenson essays Patti Smith might have bought is "An Apology for Idlers," which I've blogged about many times, including:

"In a society that respects science, expertise confers power.... Illegitimate political power can be disguised as expertise...."

"In late February, [Italian philosopher Giorgio] Agamben began... to criticize the 'techno-medical despotism' that the Italian government was putting in place through quarantines and closings.... The emergency declared by public-health experts replaces the discredited narrative of 'national security experts' as a pretext for withdrawing rights and privacy from citizens. 'Biosecurity' now serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of 'worst-case scenarios.' This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable. Many European governments, including Italy’s, have developed national contact tracing apps that allow them to track their citizens using cellphones.... [The term 'social distancing']... 'appeared simultaneously around the world as if it had been prepared in advance.'... His point is that social distancing is at least as much a political measure as a public health one, realized so easily because it has been pushed for by powerful forces....  'For fear of getting sick,' Mr. Agamben writes, 'Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything — their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.' In fact, 'the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed,' Mr. Agamben continues, and the proof is in Italians’ treatment of their dead. 'How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us, and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?'"

From "Meet the Philosopher Who Is Trying to Explain the Pandemic/Giorgio Agamben criticizes the “techno-medical despotism” of quarantines and closings" by Christopher Caldwell

Agamben uses the word inoperosità  — which translates to idleness —to refer to "instances of common customs or historic institutions getting emptied out of their long-held meanings... that can generate new systems of belief and new dangers." We imagine that we are hanging back from a life to which we can return, but we will never go there again. Something new is coming into being.

"Most countries have a serious news show first thing in the morning. This has the effect of stimulating such emotions as anger and anxiety in the listener."

"But a certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world. Duty, oh, what a burden you are! Isn’t there room for a news-free radio station? When I listen to classical music on the radio, for example when driving, there is nothing worse than having my reverie and dream-flow interrupted by the tedious reality of news headlines."

From "How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto." I mentioned this book the other day and even gave a part of that quote, but now I've gone and bought it and have access to the entire quote, so I wanted to share that. I'm also reading the whole thing, in my idle moments.

The author, Tom Hodgkinson, has written a number of books, and they all seem thematically related. The busiest one is "Business for Bohemians: Live Well, Make Money." Then there's "The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste" and "How to Be Free." A couple great parenting titles, "The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids" and "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting." That subtitle — "What to Neglect When You're Neglecting" — is a riff on the famous old pregnancy classic, "What to Expect When You're Expecting."

I'm avoiding the headlines today.... maintaining the dream-flow.

Anyway, I just bought "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting." I feel like my parents had the idea for that book. I read the first 2 pages and see that it takes this D.H. Lawrence quote seriously:

"How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

ADDED: The quote at the top of this post makes me wonder whatever happened to Erik Hagerman, "The Man Who Knew Too Little"? Blogged here in March 2018.