Doing Nothing

Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz
A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America

Category: Uh - Sociology Study? Grade: B

OK - so I saw the title of this one on the bookshelf at the bookstore. Figured it would be a fun read and, maybe, would improve my self-understanding. It started out like I expected with the author talking about the revelation he had when his son decided to take a year off before college and moved in with him. The son like a lot of 18 year olds these days was going through a slacker period, spending most of time on the couch channel surfing or playing video games. To his, surprise, the author (who had dropped out for a while himself in the 60s) found himself becoming angry. The kid should be out doing something; earning a living; accomplishing something! Being a writer, he caught himself and decided to turn these feelings in to a book and headed off to research the American art of "doing nothing".

At this point, the book, to my surprise, got more interesting, but very, very dry. To do a useful study of being idle required plenty of discussion of the nature of work in this country over the last couple of centuries. The premise Lutz started with was that, up until the 18th century, work wasn't something that a man had any choice about (and women didn't count yet). When a boy was old enough to work, he just started working - usually on the farm or the family store. It wasn't a conscious choice until roughly the time of the American Revolution. Because of this, Lutz fairly naturally starts his discussion with the American icon of work and usefulness, Ben Franklin, and the first British proponent of the idle life, Samuel Johnson.

Each chapter of the book jumps forward looking at the parallel changes in the world of work and the world of the slacker - Marx and Mellville, flappers and labor leaders, Jack Kerouac and the Man in the Gray Flannel suit and, most recently feverish entrepreneurs and the hippies and slackers of the last half century. Despite the dryness of the subject, Lutz does manage to maintain the interest all the way through the current day. He even makes a pretty good case, based on vacation schedules and a bias towards very brief meetings, that Dubya is, in fact, our first slacker President! Interestingly, he shares a belief among some of Dubya's college friends that George W. was, in fact, the inspiration for Bluto, the John Belushi character in the movie Animal House. Don't it make you proud!

This is another that's hard to recommend. Probably only read good for serious history addicts.