How to Be Free

‘Packed with wit, anecdotes and ideas … by the end you’ll want to grow your own vegetables, put on a gig in your living room, or at least read one of the many books he refers to throughout’ Word

‘How To Be Free offers some solutions to escaping the “mind-forg’d manacles” … the advice is proffered with wit’ Financial Times

‘Good-humoured and encouraging, which bolsters his central argument that, seeing as life is essentially absurd, we may as well be happy all the time’ New Statesman

Introduction

This is a book about good living, and at its heart is a simple truth: when you embrace Lady Liberty, life becomes easier, cheaper and much more fun. My intention is to show you how to remove the mind forg’d manacles and become free to create your own life. After finishing my last book, How to be Idle, I realized that idleness is, for me, virtually synonymous with freedom. To be idle is to live free. To be idle is to live by your own rules. To be idle is to unify what has been split up.

I have tried to bring together three strands of thought into a philosophy for everyday life; these are freedom, merriment and responsibility, or anarchy, medievalism and existentialism. It’s an approach to life that is also known as having a laugh, doing what you want. The Western world has allowed freedom, merriment and responsibility to be taken from it, from ourselves, and substituted with greed, competition, lonely striving, greyness, debts, McDonald’s and GlaxoSmithKline. The consumer age offers many comforts but few freedoms. Governments by their very nature make endless attacks on our civil liberties. Health and Safety is wheeled out as an excuse to extend government powers.

In seeking freedom, I would define myself as an anarchist. In anarchy, contracts are made between individuals, not between citizen and state. It proceeds from a view that people are basically good and should be left alone rather than from the Puritan view that we are all evil and need to be controlled by authority. In the Middle Ages, despite the hierarchies, we used to organize things for ourselves. The vast majority of the manacles discussed in this book had not been invented. Life was self-determined and full of variety.

What we need now is a radical redefinition of human relationships, one based on local needs rather than the greed of global capitalism. Our lives have been split into a million fragments, and our goal now is to bring them back together into unity and harmony. In this aim we are helped not only by the example of the medieval system and the anarchists and the existentialists but also by a whole series of humane figures through history. Witness will be borne by Aristotle, St Francis of Assisi, St Thomas Aquinas, the Romantics, William Cobbett, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, the back-to-the-landers, Chesterton, Eric Gill and the Distributists, Bertrand Russell, Orwell, the Situationists, the Yippies, the punks and 1970s radicals such as John Seymour, Ivan Illich and Schumacher. All form part of the long history of promoting the idea of cooperation, through which true freedom is possible, rather than competition. As we will see, there is a strong tradition out there of rejecting money, property and business as the primary objects of life. The aim is to stop looking to others to sort out our lives for us and instead to trust ourselves to do it. We are free spirits. We resist interference and we resist interfering with others.

In this book, I look at the barriers to freedom and how we can free ourselves from anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, governments, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melancholy, pain, depression and waste. We ourselves have given these enemies power over us and only we can remove that power. It is useless to sit around moaning and hope that someone else is going to do that job for us. When we realize that these impediments are one and all mind-forg’d, then, lo! See the door to the garden of liberty swing open.

Life is about recapturing lost freedoms. Through school and work, we encourage each other to believe that we are not free and that we are not responsible. We create a world of obligations, duties and things to be done. We forget that life should be lived with spontaneity, joy, love. Here, I look to the past for ideas for the future. The Greeks looked back to the Golden Age, the Romans to the Greeks, Virgil and Ovid to a bucolic idyll. The medievals also looked back to the Greeks and a simpler life. Indeed, a feature of every age is its construction of an ‘olden days’ when people were happy and things were easier. Harking back to an imagined ideal past is not mere escapist nostalgia. It is, on the contrary, a method of moving forward, of deciding on our priorities in life. And the past is a far better place to look for ideas on how to live than the future, because the future is pure fantasy and the past actually did happen. The dream of a technological utopia of the future where machines do all the work is a nonsense.

How to be free? Well, like it or not, you are free. The real question is whether you choose to exercise that freedom: there is an essential nothingness at the heart of man. We have created our own universe. Life is absurd. God is love. We are free.

1 Banish Anxiety; Be Carefree

Live merrily, oh my friends, free from cares, perplexity, anguish, grief of mind, live merrily.

Marsilius Ficinus, quoted by Robert Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Blake, ‘Milton’, 1804

We don’t care.

Punk slogan, 1977

When it comes to anxiety, I’m here to say: ‘It’s not your fault.’ Shed the burden: that dreadful, gnawing, stomach-churning sense that things are awry mixed with a chronic sense of powerlessness is the simple result of living in an anxious age, oppressed by Puritans, imprisoned by career, humiliated by bosses, attacked by banks, seduced by celebrity, bored by TV, forever hoping, fearing or regretting. It – the Thing, the Man, the System, the Combine, the Construct, whatever we want to call the structures of power – wants you to be anxious. Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.

The veritable stream of scare stories in the newspapers about rising crime makes us feel anxious. Newspapers set out to provide entertainment and gossip, stories that feed our need for shock and horror. They do it well. Flick through the Daily Mail on any given day and you’ll find that nine out of ten stories are negative and unsettling. Every radio bulletin and every TV news show, every newspaper and many of our daily conversations drive home the same message: worry, worry, worry. It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with crazy, suicidal, bomb-hurling terrorists and murderers and thieves and rotters and natural disasters. Stay home! Watch TV! Buy stuff on the web! Curl up on the sofa with a DVD! In the words of the Black Flag song ‘TV Party’: ‘TV news shows what it’s really like out there, it’s a scare!’ As in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are told that we are in a perpetual state of war – it’s just that the enemy sometimes changes. We are no longer at war with the IRA; we are now at war with Al-Qaeda. Different enemy, same anxiety and same end result: mass powerlessness.

But if we bother to investigate these myths for a few seconds, they soon reveal themselves to be mere convenient fictions. According to the brilliant anxiety analyst Brian Dean, the truth is that crime rates have remained fairly constant for the last 150 years. Dean maintains that our fear of crime is vastly out of proportion to the reality. The truth is that we face far more danger from automobile accidents and heart disease than from crime. Motor accidents kill ten people a day in the UK, and heart disease hundreds, but no one talks about banning cars or criminalizing the stress that puts a strain on the heart. The propaganda of insecurity, for Dean, is at the root of the problem: ‘Our beliefs programme our realities. If we believe that the universe is fundamentally unsafe, then we’re going to experience perpetual anxiety – which isn’t a good way to operate our brains.’

Our work, organized into the cursed jobs system, doesn’t help, condemning as it does so many of us to meaningless toil. E. F. Schumacher was the great thinker behind the book Small is Beautiful. An anarchist and an idler at heart, he argued that the very enormity, the giant, impossible, dizzying scale of modern-day capitalism saps the spirit. He also believed that this enormity had made work into something pointless, boring, soul-destroying, something to put up with, a necessary evil rather than a pleasure. In his book Good Work, he argues that industrial society causes anxiety because, by focusing primarily on greed – or what the medievals called the sin of avaritia – it doesn’t allow time for the expression of our nobler faculties:

Everywhere shows this evil characteristic of incessantly stimulating greed and avarice … mechanical, artificial, divorced from nature, utilizing only the smallest part of man’s potential capabilities, it sentences the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, no chance of development, no element of Beauty, Truth, Goodness.

I say therefore that it is a great evil – perhaps the greatest evil – of modern industrial society that, through its immensely involved nature, it imposes an undue nervous strain and absorbs an undue proportion of man’s attention.

In the current scheme of things, when we’re not working, we’re consuming. We leave the factory gates and pour our wages straight back into the system at Tesco’s. We suffer a strange split in our roles in society between that of worker and consumer, the oppressed and the courted. At least in the nineteenth century people knew they were merely a pair of hands operating a machine and that they were being exploited for another’s profit. Therefore, it was perhaps easier to rebel. The contract was straightforward. Certainly, we all know that a vigorous culture of resistance grew up among the workers in the nineteenth century, the era of work and slavery. Now, though, the moment we leave the factory gates and start to make our way back home, we the are serenaded from all sides by advertising. The service culture makes us into little princes surrounded by simpering courtiers eager to curry favour so that we will give them our cash or let them have their wicked way with us. They make us feel important. The world of advertising practises its dark arts of seduction. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the fantastically carefree Situationist Guy Debord put it like this:

The worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is plainly showed to him by all the forms of the organization and supervision or production, now finds himself, every day, outside of production, and in the guise of a consumer; with zealous politeness, he is, seemingly, treated as an adult. At this point, the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s ‘leisure and humanity’.

The commercial world, then, treats us like celebrities – ‘Because you’re worth it,’ it says. It flatters and kowtows to us and keeps on doing so right up until the moment when we hand over our credit-card details. Then we are cast aside and condemned to a purgatory of being held in a queue on a customer service line for all eternity. What fools we are.

The whole panoply of modern state control, also, is surely designed to make us feel nervous. The very institutions and devices that are sold to us as comforts and security measures create insecurity by constantly reminding us of dangers. Police; speed cameras; CCTV cameras; burglar alarms. Those two dark jailors Health and Safety are used by the interferers to foist ever more stringent attacks on our liberties. It’s worth remembering, for example, that when the police force was proposed by Home Secretary Robert Peel in 1828, there was a huge outcry from the people, who complained about the attack on their freedoms that such an idea represented. Before the government-run police force, law-keeping was managed by locally elected constables. There is now a colossal machinery of state to deal with perhaps 50,000 hard-core criminals in the country, while the 60 million lawabiding citizens have to suffer. These devices are an attack on spontaneous enjoyment of life, on pleasure.

I am anti-crime, but not because I morally disapprove of lawbreaking – in fact, I am attracted to criminals and the ASBO kids precisely because their criminality flags their refusal to submit to authority. Delinquency is a sign of life. I am against crime because it feeds straight into the government system: for every crime committed, there is a tenfold attack on personal liberties. One bomb leads to a thousand new laws. Governments love crime, as crime gives them a reason to exist – protection of the citizenry – and an excuse to control us. Therefore, the real anarchist should avoid criminal acts at all costs.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is becoming a reality in other ways, too. At the time of writing, the US government is trying to subpoena the records of Google, the search engine which can record everything we have searched for, thus gaining an insight into the innermost workings of our minds. The Internet threatens to turn from being a tool of liberation into a tool of surveillance, a spy in every home. I suppose the same thing could happen to our emails. Our most intimate conversations are being logged, recorded, saved, and they will be sitting for ever on some giant hard drive should the authorities need to look at them in the future. Big Brother is not only watching us but listening to us, eavesdropping on us and even peering into our brains and inspecting the contents of our very souls. What’s more, we have submitted entirely voluntarily to this system. It was never like this with the Royal Mail. And now there is a new threat to our civil liberties in the UK in the form of ID cards, on which will be recorded our misdemeanours.

Anxiety and our being surrounded by anxiety-inducing agents is at the absolute centre of the capitalist project. That is why I say: ‘It’s not your fault.’ Everywhere, the same myth is perpetuated: you are just one object away from happiness. It could be the latest U2 album, a donation to charity, a more comprehensive insurance policy, a different credit card, a fabulous holiday, a better job, a faster car … However many times we are disappointed by the failure of this myth to bring us satisfaction, we keep coming back for more. In the words of CRASS founder, Penny Rimbaud, we ‘feed the hand that bites us’. We remain unsatisfied. Capitalism is constantly and perpetually disappointing. The very thing that promises you freedom can quickly become the thing that oppresses you.

Anxiety is the sacrifice of creativity in the service of security. It is the giving up of personal freedoms in return for the promise, never fulfilled, of comfort, cotton wool, air-conditioned shopping centres. Security is a myth; it simply doesn’t exist. This does not stop us, however, from constantly chasing it.

Some of us may find a sort of pleasure in anxiety and its opposites, just as some enjoy swinging from white to brown, crack to heroin, from the highs to the lows. I recently sat next to a genial man in his sixties in the dining car of a train. He asked if I wanted to have a look at his Evening Standard. I said, no, that newspapers made me feel anxious by parading a load of problems which I am utterly powerless to do anything about. He replied: ‘Oh, I rather like feeling anxious. Then I have a drink!’

We are still scandalously encouraged by the medical drug-pushing establishment to believe that heart disease can be avoided by mechanical methods, i.e. stopping smoking or taking toxic pills, when it is perfectly obvious that although these might be contributory factors, the real cause of heart disease is an uneasy heart.

Idleness, doing nothing – literally doing nothing – can help fight anxiety. One strategy is simply to forget, to abandon your self and let things flow through you. Nietzsche recommends this:

To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all, for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy) – that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.

By ‘forgetfulness’, Nietzsche means the skill of learning to live. Remembering can be an enemy. How often do we lie awake at night ruminating painfully on all the things that we have to do in the future and all the things in the past that we have done wrong? This to me is why a little moderate boozing is a splendid idea, as long as the quality is high. Real ale is compost for the soul. And this is also why it is important to read decent stuff. Put quality materials into your mind, quality ingredients. A diet of good writing, without crappy newspapers and magazines, which just make the anxiety worse, will produce quality thoughts and a self-sufficient, resourceful person. Feed your mind.

In gardening, the reduced-effort method of mulching the soil with rich organic matter rather than laboriously digging it every year is coming into vogue. This is the natural, low-work way. It allows nature to get on with it with minimum intervention from man. It is the same with your mind: mulch it with quality ingredients, books, food and beauty, and it will become fertile and produce useful and beautiful things. Mulching the mind also involves a lot less work than digging it up. Digging can actually be harmful, as it will bring weed seeds to the surface that otherwise would have lain dormant. These weed seeds will then germinate and produce a new load of unnecessary work.

We also need a diet of stimulating company, good cheer, merriment, feasting and fun. ‘Good cheer’ or, to put it in the modern vernacular, ‘having a laugh with your mates’, is one of the highest pleasures that life has to offer and can blot out those anxious feelings, largely by revealing that they are shared. Removing newspapers and TV from your life helps enormously. I have managed to cut down to one newspaper a week, which leaves a lot more time to concentrate on the important things in life, like drinking and music. Replace TV with friends, and newspapers with books.

For those of us ‘in populous city pent’, as Coleridge put it, I would highly recommend avoiding the underground and bicycling instead. I had two years of commuting in London by bike. Fifteen miles of cycling a day, nearly two hours’ worth, and what a joy it was. Cycling brings an exhilarating sense of freedom and self-mastery as well as a very enjoyable sense of not spending money. You coast through the city, in it but not of it, living it and not controlled by it. On buses and trains, you are sitting targets for the advertising hoardings. On a bike, you can simply sail past them. People cite ‘danger’ as a reason to avoid cycling, but this is a pathetic excuse and an example of the mean spirit that this book is fighting. So what if there’s a little danger in your life? That’s good. Wake up! If you can’t face the idea of a bicycle, then leave a lot of time for your journey and sit on the top deck of the bus. This, too, can be a great pleasure, for the same reason: you float through the city, a detached observer. I have experienced moments of true joy when on the bus, moments when I could almost repudiate everything I have written above and truly believe that this is a wonderful world. Or walk! Walk through the parks and admire the noble gardens! But, whatever you do, avoid the underground. As my friend Mark Manning, also known as Zodiac Mindwarp, says, ‘I can’t sit staring in silence at people I don’t know.’

Another strategy for dealing with anxiety is to ensure that your day is varied. One of the joys of living in the country is that there is plenty of physical work to do. Three or four afternoons a week, I trudge up to my vegetable patch and plant, dig, weed, cart muck or just stare. A diet of solely mental work is suffocating. ‘It is obviously much easier for a hard-working peasant to keep his mind attuned to the divine than for a strained office worker,’ says Schumacher. And this is proved by my neighbour, Farmer John. One of the great things, he says, about being a farmer, is the amount of quality thinking time you get. Another idea: do not go to the gym. Gyms are all mixed up with vanity and money, with the absurd quest for perfection. They are the consumer ethic transferred to the body. They are anti-thought, and their giant screens blot out our minds and divert us from our selves. Sometimes I think that life is becoming no more than staring at a screen. We stare at a screen all day at work. We stare at screens in the gym. Buses now have screens installed in them. There are screens on trains. Then we get home and stare at our computer screen before staring at the TV screen. For entertainment, we stare at cinema screens. Work, rest and play: all involve staring at screens. Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead. Goodbye, TV; hello, chalk!

The neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale was on the right track when he smashed up a computer screen on stage. By parading a stream of other people’s lives in front of us, screens remove the responsibility to create our own lives. We watch other people doing things instead of doing them ourselves. This makes us radically powerless, and powerlessness leads to anxiety. And anxiety leads to shopping. Shopping leads to debt. Debt leads back to anxiety.

Another simple solution to anxiety is to embrace a fatalistic theology. Catholics, say, are probably less anxious than Protestants. Buddhists are certainly less anxious than Jews. If you believe that there’s nothing much that you can do that makes any sense other than to enjoy yourself, then your anxiety will fade. If you have that Puritan cast of mind and feel that you are terribly important in the world and it really matters what you do, then your anxiety will increase. Self-importance breeds anxiety (see Chapter 24). We must learn not to care – not in the sense of being selfish but in the sense of being carefree. Today, we advertise ourselves as ‘caring’ people and fling flowers at the graves of strangers in order to prove our ‘caring’ nature to anyone who might be looking. ‘I’m a really caring person,’ we say, a phrase that means precisely nothing other than that we burden ourselves with the problems of others with no practical beneficial effect whatsoever. Talk of being caring is cant.

So, free yourself of care. To become cheerful and carefree is your revolutionary duty as a freedom-seeker. Stop working; stop buying; start living. Feast, drink. Eat capons and good hams. Drink spiced wines and fine ales. Make your table groan with food. Make jam and chutney. Play the hurdy-gurdy. Get a piano. I have just converted my home pub into a music room. We found an old honkytonk piano which was practically free. So now we can have sing-songs round the old Joanna. Just as your anxiety is a product of your imagination, albeit influenced by the commercial world, so your imagination has the power to replace it with good cheer.

RIDE A BIKE

2 Break the Bonds of Boredom

Let others bemoan the maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness, for ours is an age without passion …

My life comes out all one colour.

Kierkegaard

If contemporary science were more sophisticated and subtle, then I’m absolutely certain that it would rank boredom as one of the central killers in the modern world. The Belgian writer Raoul Vaneigem, one of those anarchic work-avoiders called the Situationists and a friend of Guy Debord, wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), ‘People are dying of boredom,’ and I believe this quite literally to be true. Greyness and boredom are not only enemies of merry living, they are murderers. It would not surprise me one jot if boredom were one day revealed to be carcinogenic.

Boredom was invented in 1760. That is the year, according to academic Lars Svendsen in his excellent study A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), that the word was first used in English. The other great invention of the time was the Spinning Jenny, which heralded the start of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, boredom arrives with the division of labour and the transformation of enjoyable autonomous work into tedious slave-work.

And we are very bored. Go into chat rooms and forums on the Internet between three and five in the afternoon and you will find hundreds of posts from office workers reading, ‘Bored bored bored!’ These pleas for help, these desperate entreaties from trapped spirits, are like messages in a bottle, sent out into the ether, into the the oceans of cyberspace, in the hope that someone out there is listening and that someone out there may be able to do something to help. The odds, of course, are low.

I recently helped compile a book called Crap Jobs. We had asked readers of the Idler to send in their stories of workplace hell, and one thing that struck me was how many people cited boredom as one of the worst aspects of working. They found the boredom almost literally unbearable and would resort to all kinds of tactics to overcome it: office sabotage, crude banter with co-workers, irresponsible acts. One of the problems is that many modern jobs require just enough concentration to prevent you from going off into a dream but not enough really to occupy your mind. Jobs which are totally mechanical can be preferable, for example, to call-centre jobs. Call centres bore their customers to tears, and they bore their employees to death. Low pay is combined with the psychic torture of not knowing what fresh hell the next call is going to present you with.

Our other recent publication was called Crap Towns, and again what was striking was that the uniformity of the modern town was often cited as one of the reasons for it being crap. Something awful has happened, which is that giant retail chains have turned our towns – once so vibrant, teeming and various – into identikit retail centres peopled by shopping zombies. A town today is little more than a circle of flats gathered around a vast, airless shopping mall. Our hearts sink when we walk down the high street. We are assaulted with brand names, colourless institutions that have replaced all the fun and difference of the old stores, the grocers, haberdashers, fishmongers, bakers, florists, cobblers and apothecaries. The drive for growth and economies of scale has driven the independent spirit away. Almost. Occasionally an old Victorian shopfront survives, and its beauty, elegance and sense of fun shines out like a rainbow. There are other rays of hope: yesterday I saw a sign in the town nearest to me which cheered me. It was in the window of a TV repair shop, another dying breed of service. The sign said: ‘Old-fashioned service by the proprietor.’

To E. F. Schumacher’s notion that ‘Small is beautiful,’ we could certainly add ‘Big is boring,’ as it is the sheer scale of modern institutions which makes them so impersonal, alienating and exhausting to the spirit. McDonald’s is boring and my local Indian is not boring. Raoul Vaneigem wrote, also in The Revolution of Everyday Life, that quantity has conquered quality. We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth have been knocked aside. Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a mass scale.

One of the principal causes of boredom, it seems to me, is the removal of everyday creativity from the people. This was certainly the problem as William Morris saw it. In News From Nowhere, Morris paints a post-revolutionary society, in 2005, in which everyone is involved in some kind of freely chosen creative activity. There is no money, and Piccadilly Circus is covered with fields. This is how he saw the fourteenth century, and whether or not he romanticized the Middle Ages is not the point: it exists as a worthy ideal. The Puritan Revolution began to introduce boredom to the masses. Even religion and the path to salvation became boring. In the Middle Ages, religion had been full of blood and gore and death. Churches were centres of economic activity and partying as well as of worship. The Church was a patron of the arts and commissioned local craftsmen to make adornments for its properties. The sermons were attended largely for their entertainment value; they provided real theatre. In medieval Florence, people would queue all night to see a great preacher and would then stream out of the church after the service, weeping copiously. All this drama and theatre was removed by the Puritans, who labelled the ways of the old church ‘superstition’ and ‘idolatry’. In other words, all the pagan fun of the Catholic Church, which it had wisely kept, was taken away.

Politicians can also take a fair share of the blame for the perceived monotony of our lives. You don’t hear governments coming out with lines like ‘Tough on boredom. Tough on the causes of boredom.’ The most stupefyingly boring of all governments – and all governments are boring by their very nature – was the Nazis. Lines and rows and columns, the absence of individuality, the imposition of a bureaucratic order on things, the systematic removal of everything interesting – particularly Jews, but also gypsies, vagrants, the workshy and political dissidents. The Nazis loved sending memos, filling in forms, filing, cataloguing, keeping everything neat and tidy. What the Nazis attempted was a great big tidy-up, like the Puritans before them, and that is why excessive tidiness must be resisted.

The main reason that so many people are so desperately bored is that boring people are in charge. The money-makers, the profit-driven capitalists, high priests of utter dullness, run the business side of things. And the bureaucrats, the form-fillers and health-and-safety enthusiasts, are running the government. They actually like boredom. Being alive would scare them. But it hasn’t always been this way, and it need not always be this way. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the boring people were sidelined as ungodly. In medieval times, particularly the earlier periods, those with bourgeois, money-making values were looked down upon by the warriors, clerics and peasants. ‘There is something disgraceful about trade, something sordid and shameful,’ wrote opinion-former St Thomas Aquinas. Happiness, he said, was to be found in reflection, not distraction:

So, if the ultimate felicity of man does not consist in external things which are called the goods of fortune, nor in the goods of the body, nor in the goods of the soul according to its sensitive part, nor as regards the intellective part according to the activity of the moral virtues, nor according to the intellectual virtues that are concerned with action, that is, art and prudence – we are left with the conclusion that the ultimate felicity of man lies in the contemplation of truth.

Boredom is a form of social control. Contemporaneous with the emergence of boredom in the late nineteenth century, we find an attack on the notion of the plebs organizing their own fun. As we all know, art and entertainment in previous ages was a bottom-up affair. All dramatics were amateur, mystery plays were performed by the craftsmen’s guilds; medieval artists were also craftsmen. But radical historian E. P. Thompson shows us how suspicious the authorities became of such democratic art production as the Industrial Age dawned and control of both work and leisure was taken from the people. He cites, in The Romantics, the well-meaning reply of a local posh liberal to an application by a factory man to put on a play in 1798: ‘The play,’ she worries, ‘might have a tendency to do you harm, and to prepare you for following scenes of riot and disorder at the alehouse.’ To Thompson, this anecdote proves the increasing ‘fear of an authentic popular culture beyond the contrivance and control of their betters’. Thompson also blames a centralized education system and cites a letter written in 1911, surprisingly, by a former chief inspector of schools, which criticizes the education system for being boring: ‘The aim of his teacher is to leave nothing to [the pupil’s] nature, nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to repress all his natural impulses; to drill his energies into complete quiescence; to keep his whole being in a state of sustained and painful tension.’

Boredom is painful. For Vaneigem, the pressure to become the same as each other exhausts our spirit: ‘If hierarchical organization seizes control of nature, while itself undergoing transformation in the course of this struggle, the portion of liberty and creativity falling to the individual is drained away by the requirements of adaptation to social norms of various kinds.’

Lest we become too depressed, let us remember that the creative spirit lives on. On the Scottish Isle of Eigg near Skye, the whole island comes together for a drinking and music session every Saturday night. No one is paid; no one is hired. The music is performed for its own sake, not for profit. To fight boredom, we need to take control of our work and our leisure alike. The artist Jeremy Deller has spent many years travelling around the British Isles photographing examples of what he calls Folk Art. For Deller, this means acts of creativity which have been done more or less for their own sake created by ordinary people who would never consider themselves to be artists. This is art outside the art world, outside Cork Street galleries, museums, dealers and the Arts Council: outside, in other words, the worlds of money and bureaucracy. Examples include a giant owl made by a group of farmers, customized cars, doodles in the dust on the back of vans, a painting of Keith Richards on the back of a truck, a giant motorized elephant, gurning competitions. It’s a wonderful project, because what it proves is that the free spirit is very much alive. It means, actually, that against all the odds, boredom has not completely destroyed us.

What can we do to fight boredom? Well, the very same system that has created it also promises to relieve us of it. We are bored by work, and then advertising promises to take our boredom away, once we have handed over our cash. This is called leisure, and the word is derived from the Latin ‘licere’, meaning ‘to be permitted’. Leisure, then, is what we are allowed to do in our ‘spare time’. And it costs. In the UK, vast shops called Virgin Megastores sell piles and piles of prerecorded music and films. In their advertising, they claim to be mounting an attack on boredom. But we shouldn’t allow them to relieve our boredom for us. We have delegated the relief of boredom; we have shirked our responsibility for dealing with it. In other words, we hand over our creativity to the professional musician or film-maker. We pay someone else to alleviate our boredom. We bore ourselves in order to earn the money that we will later spend in trying to de-bore ourselves. That absurd modern trend called Extreme Sports springs to mind. In order to feel alive, because most of the year we feel dead, we hurl ourselves from a bridge every few months. Falling off a bridge, or a few seconds of thrills, is thus supposed to compensate for a whole year of boredom. And the freedom to hurl ourselves from a bridge while tied to an elastic band is held up as one of the great triumphs of modern capitalism.

This whole universe of boredom is precisely what was being attacked by the Sex Pistols. I agree absolutely with Johnny Rotten – I don’t want a holiday in the sun. I refuse your paltry offer of two weeks on a beach (boring leisure) as a break from fifty weeks in the office (boring work). In Lipstick Traces, rock ’n’ roll critic Greil Marcus brilliantly relates the Dada movement to the Situationist movement, and both to punk. What they have in common is the rage against boredom, the desire, simply, to live. What all three movements share is the passionate belief that anyone can do it. We can all be creative and we can all be free. The first number of Internationale Situationiste announced in June 1958 that the world was about to change ‘because we don’t want to be bored … raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking a point of view but far from lacking a cause – boredom is what they all have in common. The Situationists will execute the judgement contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.’ Punk was about putting creativity back into the hands of the people; anyone can do it, they said and, to prove it, here are the three chords you need to write a song: E, A and B7. Do it yourself.

Well, I can go one better than that. Instead of the guitar, I urge you to take up the ukulele. This four-stringed marvel is very cheap, very portable and very easy to play. It is therefore even more punk than the guitar. Here are the three chords you need to play most songs:

Get a uke and you will never be bored again. You could even make some extra cash by busking. The uke is freedom. Indeed, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s first album is called Anarchy in the Ukulele, and aptly titled it is too.

Behind the attack on boredom is a radical desire to take control of our lives back from the giant organizations to whom we have more or less willingly entrusted ourselves. This is an act of gross irresponsibility on our part. But it is not too late. We simply need to discover our own creativity. The simple way to avoid boredom is to make stuff; already, there are the glimmerings of a new movement in this area, to which the success of US magazine Ready Made (www.readymademag.com) bears witness. My heart also soars when I see skateboarders. Having worked in a skateboarding shop for a year, I know what a radically creative and positive pursuit skateboarding is. It is a self-governing movement, a federation, with its own magazines, fanzines, competitions and businesses, all displaying a high level of ingenuity, independence and creativity. One of the latest companies on the scene is the brilliantly named Death Skateboards, who have the equally effective slogan, ‘Death to Boredom’, and three cheers for that.

PLAY THE UKULELE

THE BEGINNING

Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Acknowledgements

HOW TO BE FREE

Introduction

1 Banish Anxiety; Be Carefree

2 Break the Bonds of Boredom