There's idleness as in "doing things that aren't work" and idleness as in "being bored". Both have been broken: the former by our insane work ethic and the latter by our insane addiction to mobile devices.
We're being pressured into this, yes, but it's also up to us to push back. You genuinely can work less. You genuinely can put your phone down. Both can hurt, but both are almost definitely good for you.
A world in which we have time to muse, ponder, wander, think, create, listen... This is the world I want to inhabit, and I push myself everyday to try and do so. It's sometimes unfeasibly hard: phones are addictive and when you work for yourself the money <> time equation is hard to deny. But it's important, to me anyway, to see the sea and the moon and my kids growing up.
Yes? Do you suppose I can go wherever I want, and do whatever I want whenever I want to?
I'm a cog in a complex socioeconomic system. What I can and cannot do is limited by that system.
If I want to get into let's say making music, or learning philosophy, I can't quite do that, because they require time (10s of 1000s hours each), a resource that I can't spare because it's consumed by work, and other required activities.
I can learn superficially over the course of decades, but the results would be unsatisfactory to say the least.
"Do you suppose I can go wherever I want, and do whatever I want whenever I want to?"
..no, and I didn't suggest that. But you can make choices. Mobile phone use is absolutely under your control. How and where you work maybe less so, but you still do. People make incremental or radical decisions to change their working lives all the time, even if they're trapped within a system that feels rigid.
The smartphone ecosystem is designed to be as addictive as possible, targeting specifically the "reptile brain" that can't be persuaded with logic or strong will. We are being conditioned to respond to it like lab animals, and none of this is regulated in any way. Increasingly, there are no choices outside of it, so it's either accept the manipulation or be excluded (also from social life). You do have some autonomy but it's very limited.
That's just not true. The reptile brain is a thing, yes, but you absolutely can counter it with practice and logic. It's comfortable to delude yourself that you have no free will in this instance but you do.
When I'm not working I'm learning how to be a meditation (MBSR) teacher and we spend a lot of time looking at the amygdala, fight / flight, how to counter "real" physical symptoms, how to sit quietly in meditation for minutes, then tens of minutes, then hours on end. All of this is trainable, including our responses to external factors like addictive systems such as the mobile / digital / social ecosystem.
I'm very far from perfect but I try - and succeed most days - to keep my mobile use down to 2 hours, never work evenings or weekends, and try where I can to seek out deliberate stillness (some call it "boredom"). I go for a walk without my phone. I leave my phone downstairs when I sleep. I've given up social media - in fact really my only vice now is HN :-) - I absolutely do have a choice in how I deal with all this. It isn't easy, but it is a choice.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit to make my point. Which is that an average person in practice won't be able to do that. And even an exceptional person has the odds stacked against them.
We're being pressured into this, yes, but it's also up to us to push back. You genuinely can work less. You genuinely can put your phone down. Both can hurt, but both are almost definitely good for you.
A world in which we have time to muse, ponder, wander, think, create, listen... This is the world I want to inhabit, and I push myself everyday to try and do so. It's sometimes unfeasibly hard: phones are addictive and when you work for yourself the money <> time equation is hard to deny. But it's important, to me anyway, to see the sea and the moon and my kids growing up.