I’ve discovered a charming blog on Substack where the writer devotes much of his time to writing about how to successfully lounge around all day. The art of loafing is a skill that must be developed and honed in places such as the hot blast of the noonday sun in July. As I have spent the majority of the last 25 odd years in Italy, I have become rather good at doing nothing at all when the time is right for it.
The core principle of the enjoyment of leisure time is the fundamental understanding that it is perfectly acceptable at times to do nothing at all. A feeling of guilt, or even worse, a desperate inclination to spring up from the chaise lounge after only a few scant minutes lying down with an Americano and a magazine you have no intention of reading, simply because you feel that you must be doing something, anything at all, is the antithesis to practicing the fine art of wasting time.
So I am in favour of the philosophical ideals that the writer explores in his essays. But I was reading one of his pieces and the following passage got me thinking:
Quite suddenly, I looked around me, and not one of my fellow tourists seemed to care about the beauty standing before them. Oh, there must have been perhaps a dozen or more of us waiting for the ferry, and every one of them was bent over that little glowing rectangle we now carry everywhere like a secular rosary. I watched them, slightly horrified, as they hunched and tapped. They squinted their eyes not at the sea or the stones or the ancient grandeur before them, but at a glass screen that lights up.
Now, I understand the frustration at scenes of this type. But this is nothing new; what’s changed is simply the medium. When I was a whitewater rafting guide back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the mobile phone as we know it today was not yet invented. But that didn’t stop people from being glued to a device all day. Back then the offending electronic item was the camera. I would take people on rafting trips in places of spectacular natural beauty; the White Nile in Uganda; the Nahatlatch river in British Columbia; wild torrents in the Italian Alps, or jungle rivers in Far North Queensland.
And most of them held a camera to their face for the entire trip. Click, click, click, taking reams of photos with which they would bore their relatives to tears when they returned home from their great adventure. As they strove to capture the best possible photo with which to impress their social circles, they saw nothing and experienced next to nothing of what was around them.
At times I would exhort them to put away the cameras and really look, and see, and soak in their surroundings. You’re on the White Nile, the beginning of the longest river in the world, mentioned in the Bible; put away the cameras for the love of all things holy.
They would stare at me, their blank faces uncomprehending. And after a short time the cameras would inch back up and then, click, click, click, off we go again.
Most people are idiots. If it’s not the glowing screen of Baal it would just be something else. So I leave them to their addiction. People have been not seeing the world for a very long time. The only difference today is how obvious it now is.
You can find Adam Piggott at Substack, and purchase his books here.
