Like a lot of fathers, Tom Lutz wanted his son to be just like him; the only problem was he still wasn’t sure who he was. All Lutz was certain about was that he wanted his 18-year-old son, Cody, to get off the sofa and start earning a living.
Lutz, a highly accomplished author, professor, musician and part-time screenwriter in Los Angeles, was also an ex-hippie who had spent almost a decade after high school wandering aimlessly from job to job caught up in the heady romance of the late 1960s. Now middle-aged, he still considered himself to be an open-minded guy and a free thinker; someone who might even relish his own son’s maverick stance to do just nothing for a while.
But Lutz found himself furious at Cody’s inertness and channeled his anger into a blistering exploration of his own feelings about work and leisure and accomplishment and monetary success.
The result of this effort is “Doing Nothing,” his incredibly engaging and offbeat meditation on the history of the American work ethic and its development over the past few centuries, and the various counter movements that have arisen to challenge it.
Lutz takes us on a deliciously wild ride through the richly textured cultural history of loafers, loungers, slackers and bums, and all those who fall somewhere in between, while seriously examining the underlying feelings of restlessness, malaise, radicalism and plain old wanderlust that prompted many to rebel from the constraints of an ordinary working life. Lutz analyzes the complex and often overlapping social forces that helped fuel the rebellion – industrialization, consumerism, the weakening of religious control, the ravages of war and the continually brewing hostility between the upper and lower classes. According to the author, the slacker movement is cyclical and resilient, and keeps reinventing itself; from the enthusiastic writings of Samuel Johnson in 1758 on the joys of being idle to the countless websites we have today that promote an anti-work credo.
But it is mostly Lutz’s heartfelt regret for what he feels he may have sacrificed that ripples through these pages coupled with his own ambivalence about what constitutes a meaningful working life.
A confessed workaholic for the past 15 years, he still wonders if, “Perhaps I was feeling the kind of anger that results from shame – shame that maybe I had, after all, been duped. Maybe I had known better when I was my son’s age, before I had become part of this laboring society and fully accepted my place in it. Maybe the artists and beachcombers and communards and dropouts were right, that life held more mystery, more possibility, more beauty than could be grasped from an existence dominated by narrowly conceived quotidian labors. What was I doing wrapped up in my career? Wasn’t I supposed to write a novel, after all? Did I trade that dream for a mess of potage?”
Lutz points out that today’s slackers are asking the same questions that have been raised for centuries. Are the goals we are working toward worthy? Are we wasting our lives? Why do we often feel so bored and restless? How much of what we do makes no sense at all? How many of us still want to chase a dream even if we no longer remember what that dream was?
Lutz can still recall the carefree abandon of his old hippie days when it wasn’t unusual to feel a sense of wonderment and surprise, remembering fondly, “I loved the days spent rounding up cattle and moving them to fresh pasture in the Midwest, and the bizarre nights spent with those adventurous or oblivious people who pick up young freaks hitchhiking down the coast of California, or who befriend strangers they find wandering through the lonesome towns of the Great Plains. I’m grateful for the time I spent playing music in low-rent bar bands, glad that I rode the rails from Tennessee to California, from Denver to Pittsburgh, that I lived in a van on the Costa Brava, rode a motorbike through the hills of Montenegro, and choked on mosquito coils in a Thai beach hut.”
But he still wants his son off the sofa!
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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Doing Nothing
A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
By Tom Lutz
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $25
