Summary
Is idleness ever a virtue? In a world that seems to privilege utility and productivity above all else, Matthew Sweet considers whether we can rethink the importance of doing nothing. His guests for Radio 4's late night ideas discussion programme are:
Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and author of books including Idle Thoughts: Letters on Good Living, How to Live Like a Stoic: A Handbook for Happiness Polly Dickson, a literary scholar at the University of Durham, who’s researching the art of doodling Katrien Devolder, Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford Gavin Francis, doctor and author of many books including The Bridge Between Worlds and coming in Feb 2026 The Unfragile Mind, Making Sense of Mental Health Steve Connor, cultural historian, Director of Research of the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College, London.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | My Christmas Mix is pure 90s festive nostalgia. |
| 0:11.1 | You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat. |
| 0:14.0 | Ho! |
| 0:14.3 | Ho! Ho! No, no, no. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems. |
| 0:20.4 | Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really slay? It's Christmas kitchen disco season, surely. |
| 0:26.4 | Give me hip-hop Christmas bangers every day. Those Christmas tracks that are straight out of Lapland. |
| 0:30.9 | Get all kinds of Christmassy. Just search Christmas music on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.9 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:40.7 | Hello, my name's Matthew Sweet and you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:45.1 | Hey, what? Sorry? Oh, I was miles away. I was trying to do nothing. Get myself into the zone of |
| 0:51.3 | idleness. As tricky as I'm live on Radio 4 as are my guests, so this |
| 0:56.8 | edition of freethinking might be a bit paradoxical, as we'll all be working quite hard to |
| 1:02.3 | understand the nature of doing not very much at all. Now, usually I would turn to the history |
| 1:07.6 | of philosophy for a cue, but do you know, not that many philosophers |
| 1:11.5 | have been bothered themselves to write about the subject. Maybe it's in the nature of idleness |
| 1:17.7 | that it's produced more practice than theory. Socrates, for instance, Ligger, houseguest, |
| 1:24.0 | sloppy dresser, never wrote anything down as far as we know. Now, I don't want to say that |
| 1:28.9 | our guests are raring to go exactly, but they're here. So let's meet them by finding out whether |
| 1:34.6 | or not they are idlers. The academic, Stephen Connor, idler or not? |
| 1:41.0 | I work all the time, but I hardly work at all. |
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