The Current - The benefits of being idle

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

In her new book Going to Seed, Kate J. Neville reflects on the value of being idle. In September, she talked about the importance of escaping the busyness that builds up around family, work and social demands.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. If you tell someone that they're going to seed, well, that may not go over particularly well. The phrase can mean they're becoming less productive. They're deteriorating, maybe even heading for death. For gardeners and farmers, though, going to seed has a very different meaning. It's when the seed is getting ready to grow, meaning a renewal of life, not an end of life. Kate Neville is an associate professor in the

Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. And she's author of a book called Going to Seed, Essays on Idleness, Nature and Sustainable Work. She spoke with Matt Galloway in September. Here's their conversation. What does that phrase mean to you, going to seed? Oh, it is such a rich phrase that as your kind of brief note at the beginning here suggests, has so many layers to it, really depending on the angle that you're looking at it. And to me, I think it's this real productive question of what is it that we're looking at when we think about these seeds? What is it that we're thinking about the possibility of and the future of whose futures are kind of held in these seeds that are heading out.

And this is a time, you know, here in the North in Whitehorse, where we're seeing a lot of these plants going to seed, kind of pollen in the air and on the water, these seeds kind of making their way into the world for their own futures and so out of our own control. The book has that subtitle, which is Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work. And I mean, a bit like the phrase going to seed, idleness, if you describe somebody as being idle, that can be seen as a slight, not as something that perhaps people want to strive toward. How do you define what idleness is? It's a slippery term to me. And I should say that the book started really with idleness, and it didn't start with seeds.

That kind of question of seeds came later when I was speaking to a gardener friend about these ideas and had kind of thought about going to seed in that more colloquial way that it's kind of the end, the deterioration. And she was aghast and said, no, no, it's that productive time. Nothing about the garden is idle in these moments. But really that question of idleness came out of a lot of different sources of reading and thinking. And in particular, the writer Mark Sluka has this essay from 2004 that was published in Harper's Magazine that really was about the kind of trap of constant busyness and how in order to be good political citizens, good social members of a community, to have undirected time and space to think about how we want the world to be and to imagine other futures. And it sort of put in contrast with the kind of busyness, the work that we're always tied up with. with the kind of busyness, the work that we're always tied up with. And so I think idleness has been percolating for me as this kind of concept that holds incredible political power,

even as it's so denigrated, even as we have this kind of move towards the need for constant productivity. And so I think I've been really troubled with it for a long time. Undirected time. Yeah. Yeah. This kind of idea that there's not always an end goal in sight. There's not always a kind of structure under which we're headed towards the goals that we know we have, a time where creative possibilities are maybe more open. And so many people don't have this in their lives, not very much of it anyway, sort of are bound by the necessities of life to the demands of others. And so I think there's kind of a real question of freedom and autonomy that comes into that, where it's not always something put upon us in order to make

ends meet or live up to expectations, but to sort of imagine something different. but to sort of imagine something different. So I read this book in the spring and then sat with it and ended up taking a little bit of time off in the summer. And it was time that was, I mean, I like to talk about going fallow where you don't really have goals or you don't have a specific thing that you want to do.

And that's hard to do, but I find it really rewarding in sometimes. And I was thinking a lot about the book as I was doing that, which is kind of doing a whole lot of nothing, but thinking about that idea of idleness, not as something that is in opposition to work, but as something that we should strive toward. How are you idle this summer? What has your summer been like? And I ask you that in part because, I mean, you're in Whitehorse and the location has something to do with your attempt to be idle. Yeah, it's a lucky thing in so many ways. This split life that I both spend time in the north.

I actually live on the unceded territory of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation in a small town in northern BC, just on the southern side of the Yukon border in Atlin. And I lived there before I got a job in Toronto at the University of Toronto. And so for just under 10 years, I've kind of split this life between the north and the south between this kind of more rural, kind of off-grid cabin life, small town life with a lot of kind of self-reliance of the community and community reliance in particular. And then downtown Toronto, which Matt, you know so well, the sort of buzz of urban life in the sort of densely populated Ontario urban landscape. And so really thinking about what the contrast between these periods of time both requires and enables and the different kinds of work that really becomes apparent in these different places. And so part of life for me in Atlin and off-grid cabin is thinking about water, thinking about heat from a wood stove, thinking really about sort of what does it take to sustain a life that is more connected

to the non-human world? And then what does that mean in Toronto? And what does it mean to try to do both to stay connected to an urban kind of landscape while being in a place where those rhythms, those timeframes don't really match up that tidily. So I think for me, there's a lot of that kind of reflection on the tensions and the contradictions between those two. What have you learned about stillness and being idle from the natural world? Yeah, and I really appreciate that question, because I think so many of the books that I've read about leisure and idleness and work and the future of work are very, very human focused and necessarily so. It's sort of this question about social inequalities, who has the ability to work,

who has the opportunity to do work that is meaningful. And I've learned a lot from the kind of thinking about these social dynamics, but what happens when we look alongside our human endeavors to the work of the world that sustains us. And so I really wanted to think about idleness and pausing of our human work as not just going inward, but also a chance to look outward at what we often ignore, what often goes unseen in our daily life, and maybe especially when we're embedded in very human structures. How have you seen that in your own life? The book starts with you in the cabin and the inhabitants that might be there that you're trying to pretend aren't there,

whatever is burrowing away. Yeah. So as you say, the book starts with a story about mice moving into a kind of structure that's attached to the cabin that I live in, in spite of constant efforts to usher them outwards, the kind of constant return of these mice through the cracks and gaps in the logs and sort of thinking, you know, my work against the work of the mice and they're working hard to build their home, to have their young to be warm in winter, and I'm working very hard to try to clear them out.

And sort of that tension between the work that we do and the work that others do that sometimes is at odds with each other. And I tell a story later, too, about this kind of battle that often happens with beavers that sort of block culverts or flood farmland and roads. But the flip side too, is I think that I'm humbled by the way that I am so dependent on the work of the world. I mean, the trees that we burn in our wood stove grew for so many years, you know, converting sunlight into what then produces warmth and kind of this sense that we're so intertwined with the work of other beings. And kind of this sense that we're so intertwined with the work of other beings. Where do you think the denigration of idleness comes from? You say that it's often positioned against work and that things like leisure and play, people will see some value in that.

But idleness is, you know, of dubious value. Where does that come from, do you think? you know, of dubious value. Where does that come from, do you think? Yeah, Matt, I'm not a historian, but I learned a lot from a historian in particular, Cara Newk Daggett. She sort of traces Scottish Presbyterian ideas embedding themselves into kind of the theories of physics that emerged and sort of embedded their ways into how we understand the very nature of energy and sort of the religious tenets that came about to tell us what the value of work was and the kind of dangers of idle hands that could be used for no end of trouble. But that's not the only tradition that I came across that has this kind of idea about the value of work. And I think that there's kind of a piece of it that is the importance of doing work to

sustain ourselves, to be active citizens in our communities, to tend to the world around us. But there's also this sort of fear of not working, that we won't be seen as valuable, and we won't be seen as important members of society. And I think that these things are often intention, and idleness gets collapsed maybe a little bit. The sort of variety of ways that we can not be productive in a certain sense ends up sort of narrowed when we forms of idleness at different moments and that they're not necessarily opposites, that it's not just work versus idleness, but this incredible relationship between moments of different forms of work and moments of different forms of idleness. I mean, in the face of that construct, you say that idleness can be a form of responsibility. You say that it's a crucial emancipatory project. What do you mean by that? You say that it's a crucial emancipatory project. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, and this goes back in many ways to Mark Sluka, thinking about sort of the need to pause our constant distraction, constant busyness human being, it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. And, you know, I'm speaking on a public radio here. It sort of, it feels really powerful to think about freedom of press and democratic processes and the need to be able to have that undirected time we talked about. And that that's sort of a way to imagine what flourishing could look like that isn't just what we've been assuming or handed down. And so I do think that there's something sort of, you know, anarchy, anarchism is often really denigrated as a sort of chaotic negative force. But it's really about non-hierarchical elements of organization, something that's not just handed down by authorities on high. What do you mean? What does that actually look like practically? Yeah, and you know, I'm not sure I know.

It's a really good question. You know, maybe really directly I see it in this town of Atlin where I live, where it's an unincorporated municipality and things run through the First Nations government and through the British Columbia government. But so much happens through community organization, through volunteer organization, through people recognizing the needs of others and responding in these generous ways. needs of others and responding in these generous ways. And I think those kinds of moments of experimentation at these different scales might give us insights into what it could look like. I definitely don't have kind of a big answer to that as much as sort of the sense that we need to experiment. We need to imagine really widely in these different contexts. Can you imagine a different form of work or rethinking what work is and a way that work could be, I mean, more sustainable?

And the catchphrase, and you kind of pick at this a little bit, this idea of a work-life balance, what have you, is not the answer. But a way that work is not just shouldn't you be doing something? And then if you're not doing something, you're seen as kind of burning time when you should be, you know, a more productive member of society. Can you rethink work in that way? So I think what I've been discovering through this writing is that we already do a lot of that in our language. We name a lot of things as work that are very different from one another. So we talk about, you know, the work that is done in an administrative or bureaucratic kind of institution. And we talk about parenting as work, childcare work or

caretaking work. We talk about creative work often, that sort of language that's very familiar. We talk about schoolwork, but studying is different from taking care of children, is different from tending the ill, is different from painting in so many different ways. And yet we sort of shorthand them all to work. And so I think in some ways, rather than reimagining work, I think we need to reimagine how we value different forms of activity and what does that look like in society. And there have been lots of different experiments. And Matt, you know so much about this from your conversations with so many people. But things like universal basic income as one way of thinking about supporting people through necessities. Mutual aid is sort of something that came up often during the pandemic as sort of a return to these kind of

caregiving to one another to imagine different periods of time in people's lives where they're pulled very strongly in certain directions or have more space and time to kind of pause and step back. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think we learned much from the pandemic? I mean, particularly when it comes to the idea of slowness. There was a moment where, not everybody certainly, but some people, many people, were able to slow themselves down,

maybe able to rethink what their relationship with work looked like. And then in the years that followed, a lot of that went back out the window. Did we learn much, do you think, from that time about, yeah, the value of slowness? It's an important question and I think that there's maybe a very different set of answers from what various communities or individuals learned versus whether the structures of society have changed to allow us to put that knowledge into practice.

the structures of society have changed to allow us to put that knowledge into practice. And I think that in lots of ways, the sort of knowledge that people had about the challenges and the value of slowing down and staying home in different ways hasn't really been translated into changes in these structures of institutions that we have that are constantly speeding up. So I think that that's still something where there is a lot of kind of change that is needed. And maybe this is too, Matt, as you say, not everyone in the pandemic had those opportunities, right? Lots of people who were on the front lines, and especially those who were underpaid, who are undercompensated, who have very little control over their own work lives. People, you know People doing that caregiving work, doing that sort of provision of services, were not the ones who had the opportunity to stay home.

They were bound up as much during the pandemic as before, or maybe even more so in those sort of really quick structures that they had to continue racing to meet. That's not even back then. I mean, one of the arguments against this idea of idleness, that you should try and find time to be idle, is that at its heart, that idea can be exploitative. That idle time is only possible for some people because of the labor of others.

That it's a luxury and that that luxury depends on somebody else being squeezed so that you can be idle. What do you make of that? Yeah, Matt, I'm glad that you brought that up because this isn't new, right? These are longstanding strategies for those who benefit from the work of morality associated with certain forms of work, allows us to step back and think about who's benefiting from these and what is that perpetuating. There's sort of stories from mythology, stories from history that reinforce these kinds of ideas of what constitutes the good life and for whom that I think we really need to pull apart. And, you know, the Greek poet Hesiod,

I think maybe is one of the ones who sort of talks about when you work, you'll be much better loved by the gods. And that was in the eighth century BC. And sort of thinking, you know, who is it who's being loved in these particular ways? And why is this so important to reinforce? So, how can we go about thinking of idleness as something that is good for all of us to make sure that your gain doesn't come at the expense of somebody else? Yeah, I think maybe broadening the question

to sort of within human relationships, but also beyond them is a big part of that, which is, you know, we see the consequences of our constant activity, our constant production that so often comes from extraction. And I think that's a key piece of why it's good for all of us to think about stepping back is the consequences of an ever accelerating kind of economy and ever accelerating production takes its toll on the systems of non-human life on which we depend that the whole planet requires. And so we see that when there's wildfires, we see that when there's droughts,

we see that when there's floods, these sort of incredibly hot, record-breaking hot days that we're seeing around the world really reinforce why it's so important, why it's so good for all of us to think about stepping back. And particularly those who have the control over these systems, right, who are in positions that benefit from the work of others and from these kind of systems of production. How do you think of progress in the face of that? You said that the book is not a self-care book, but it's also not an anti-technology book. You're not saying that we completely distance ourselves or disconnect from those systems that allow us to be able to go up to a cabin in the woods or to disappear off the grid for a while.

So how do you square that? Yeah. So Matt, I'm skeptical of the term progress. I really am in the sense of sort of what are we progressing towards? And I think that's the big question that kind of the term progress doesn't itself answer. It's not in itself a thing. It's sort of what is that end? What is that kind of possible future that allows for the freedom and the autonomy of more beings, more people, more non-humans? And the botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer has this beautiful essay in Emergence magazine where she talks about economies of abundance and these relationships of reciprocity. economies of abundance and these relationships of reciprocity. And I think maybe that's where I see kind of the promise of progress of sort of thinking, what does it look like to recognize ourselves within this kind of thriving, ever-changing, mutually sustaining world? And what role do we play in kind of bringing out that beauty and that kind of potential, even just in a

moment balance? Like, what does it look like to contribute to that versus to move too quickly? bringing out that beauty and that kind of potential, even just in a moment, balance. Like, what does it look like to contribute to that versus to move too quickly? You know, I read recently in an article about wildfires that, you know, the boreal forest depends on fires, right? These black spruce need fire to regenerate. But if they burn too often, they can't continue. They can't reproduce. And so it's not sort of work or no work, idleness or not idleness, you know, fire or not fire. It's sort of where is that balance that allows that regeneration, that allows that future?

And I think that's sort of these questions of where does progress fit into that and where do our technologies fit into that? Let me ask you two final things before I let you go. One is, do you feel like, is there really the opportunity to get people to think differently about this? And I ask this because we are in a world that's filled with life hacks, how to squeeze more into your day.

You should listen to your podcast at two times the speed rather than one so that you can listen to more podcasts rather than actually just listen to the thing at the speed that it was recorded. Do you think that what you are saying in this book of essays is going to find an audience that is receptive, that is ready for something like that? I think everyone is hungry for a way of doing things differently that feels more grounded, more connected. you know more grounded more connected so I think it's sort of adding to a conversation that's already loud and fast and vibrant and slow at the same time I think there's so much happening in this space that I'm maybe just excited to be part of that conversation as opposed to thinking

I'm leading something brand new you know I'll say that this book was the product of this writing prize that was put together by the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World with Terrain.org and with Texas Tech University Press. And I think about this huge literary community that's already thinking about place and our relationships with it and with community and culture. And so I really think that this is happening. This is a live, vibrant conversation. Just finally, people might've had a moment to catch their breath in the summer. And what you're saying and that dichotomy between being idle and being productive and how people look at them differently, they're thinking, you know what? I wish there was

a way for me to keep idleness in mind while I get back into the machine. What would you say to them? That I think that's exactly right. You know, it's easier in lots of ways to think about idleness when we have vacation, when we have a holiday, a time away. But these ideas are maybe most essential when we're caught up in the flurry of life that is so quick, that is so urgent. And maybe I'll say too, we often want to respond to urgency with more urgency, with more speed. And sometimes the kind of answer to a moment of crisis or a moment of urgency is to pause,

to take that deep breath, to reflect on how you want to respond to it and be present in it. And so I would say that it's sort of back into these kind of rhythms of the fall. And, you know, that's maybe the most urgent time to think about carving out space to imagine, why are we doing this? What are we doing this for? At what point can we really do this deliberately, which might look like a lot of work at certain moments, but it might not look like responding as though everything's a crisis, even when it is. You're able to do that when you're not at your cabin, but when you are in the belly of the beast in the center of downtown Toronto?

Oh, I think it's an aspiration and a pursuit rather than an end. I think it's something that I don't know that I'll ever achieve as much as strive for. And thinking about that cycle, when is the pausing most necessary? But I'll try. I'll try. Kate, thank you very much. Matt, thank you so much. Kate Neville is the author of Going to Seed, Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work. She's also an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. Matt Galloway spoke with her in September.

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