Learning to be a loser: a philosopher's case for doing nothing

[Celerity]

For Emil Cioran, a life devoid of action, practical ambitions and busyness is a life in which room has been made for meaning

https://psyche.co/ideas/learning-to-be-a-loser-a-philosophers-case-for-doing-nothing



Except for a painful one-year stint as a high-school teacher of philosophy in his native Romania, Emil Cioran never had a real job. ‘I avoided at any price the humiliation of a career,’ he observed toward the end of his life. ‘I preferred to live like a parasite [rather] than to destroy myself by keeping a job.’ When he chose to move to France, in 1937, it mattered to him that Paris was ‘the only city in the world where you could be poor without being ashamed of it, without complications, without dramas.’



Like his ancient predecessor, the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope, Cioran turned his poverty into a badge of philosophical honour. For the most pressing needs of his body, he would rely on the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends. He wore other people’s hand-me-down clothes or entertained them with his wit and erudition in exchange for a meal. He would do anything, except take a proper job.

Doing nothing in a world where everybody seemed busy doing something – anything – struck Cioran as the only lifestyle worth pursuing and defending. A life devoid of action and practical ambitions, of distractions and busyness, is a life in which room has been made for meaning: ‘Anything good comes from indolence, from our incapacity of taking action, executing our projects and plans,’ Cioran wrote. And he behaved accordingly. When a journalist once asked him about his writerly routines, his answer was candour itself: ‘Most of the time I don’t do anything. I am the idlest man in Paris … the only one who does less than I do is a whore without clients.’



Cioran may have been joking, but his idleness was serious business. It was an arduous lifetime project, into which he put his best efforts and which he served with complete dedication. He took up this path not out of some particularly lazy disposition, but because of his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding. ‘[T]o do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual,’ Oscar Wilde observed decades before Cioran. If we are to understand the world, we have to stop acting upon it: we have to contemplate it. Contemplation and action are sworn enemies. Doing nothing brings forth an angle from which to look at everything with cosmic detachment. Idleness breeds depth of vision and a truly philosophical perspective.

Cioran gained his greatest insights not from books or fancy schools, but from walking aimlessly around Paris and from his nights of atrocious insomnia. He didn’t learn philosophy from his professors, but from his conversations with beggars, drunkards and sex workers. Walking in the footsteps of other great idlers of the contemplative tradition – such as Herman Melville’s Bartleby or Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov – Cioran was in a good position to explore the vast expanses of nothingness that precedes our coming into being and which will follow it. Looking the void in the face was his all-consuming job, even as he was jobless for most of his life.

snip

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. This is most definitely The Dude's kinda guy :) (nt)

[Celerity]

3. The Dude abides.

[cachukis]

2. I don't endorse this, but live it in my own way.

[dweller]

4. Brings to mind Wallace Steven's The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


✌🏻

[Doc Sportello]

6. Very apropos

Wallace Stevens is greatly underappreciated. Excellent choice.

[bahboo]

5. how have I not heard of this guy until now...

I feel like I wasted my whole life doing shit...although in all honesty, I do excel in doing nothing...

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread Celerity

[Solly Mack]

8. K&R

[malthaussen]

9. A man after my own heart. n/t

[cbabe]

10. That's nice. Who's cooking and cleaning and making his clothes and.

[Celerity]

11. For the most pressing needs of his body, he would rely on the kindness of strangers and the

generosity of friends. He wore other people’s hand-me-down clothes or entertained them with his wit and erudition in exchange for a meal. He would do anything, except take a proper job.

[stuffmatters]

12. I love this post & thread.

Thank you, Celerity.