In Praise of Idleness

When I was in university, I liked to go to the bookstore to browse the books on the non-text book shelves. Initially, I would only browse the computer science section. At that time, unlike now, the shelves were full of titles that did not try to teach you how to use "productivity software". Instead, they had many titles that were quite obscure. I loved browsing them because they gave me an idea about the extend of the computer science field. For some reason, I had not discovered the library yet.

For a different reason I don't remember any more, I started browsing the philosophy section. Initially, I aimed for only one philosopher: Bertrand Russell. He was the only Western philosophy that I read about when I was in high school, even then indirectly. As usual, I did not know which work of his was important, and which was just for the "common man". Anyhow, one of the books I eventually bought is called "In Praise of Idleness". It is about why leisure time is important for a person.

When I bought the book, I did not know I would agree with him wholeheartedly when I started my graduate school: spending most of my time reading books in parks, going fishing, etc.

Now that I think about it, I learned the most when I was playing with the department computers, installing this and reading that program, all really for no particular purpose in mind. For one summer, we went to the department computer room around 10:30 p.m., fooled around with the programs we could find online, read all the RFCs we could find, implemented all the protocols described in the RFCs we could understand, went to the same donut shop for donuts around 3 a.m., back to the computer room for another three hours, went back to my apartment for a snack, usually boiled pork tongues with chillies, and then went to bed.

I did not do a thing that summer that I could report to my supervisor about. But I had a very good supervisor, a topic I will write about soon. She allowed me to learn to think, to write, and to simply find my own way. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to be supervised by her.

Back to idleness. It is actually very hard for me to imagine what I would be like without that summer.

Idleness is so important, indeed.