When doing my research for Productive Anywhere, I had the chance to interview Raam Dev, who is currently traveling around the United States, embracing a slower pace of life, writing, and deliberately living on a small budget. After finishing the interview, we talked a bit more about our observations and experiences within the work-fetishizing Western societies.

As it turns out, not being stressed and not being angry about our labor situation apparently makes us just as rare as people walking aimlessly through the forest.

The reactions from most people to this lifestyle are puzzled, sometimes even a bit unfriendly. Especially if I introduce myself as an idler, I’m simply seen as lazy or as a chronic procrastinator.

This made me think about how there is a difference between procrastination, laziness and idleness.

It’s maybe just a play with semantics, but for me, laziness is simply dead and sterile: You’re lazy after work because you don’t have any power left. You just feel exhausted, and you don’t want to do anything else, so you retract to your couch and TV.

If laziness is nothing but apathy, procrastination is the desire to escape from boring or gruesome work: You don’t want to do a certain thing, so you start doing something else. In this sense, procrastination is an “away from something”.

Idleness, on the other hand, is a “towards something”: It’s a movement to stop all movement. An invitation to fully be in the present moment. A moment to simply embrace life as it is. As such, being idle can become a part of the broader celebration of life I wrote about some time ago: It means saying yes to the world at large, and it means accepting that most things in life are – all in all, in the big picture – okay and wholesome.

That’s why I’m happy to be an idler. Fancy to join me?

And then came the day when some of us understood that all we had known about time was wrong. It’s not precise, it’s not objective, it’s not limited. It’s not about being first, outrunning others, or even getting somewhere faster.

This was the day we would just drop out and start to live life at our own pace. Because our own pace was the only thing that mattered: Some of us would go faster, speak faster, think faster; others would go slower, speak slower, think slower.

We noticed that time and speed are much more personal than we had ever thought: It doesn’t matter which measurable speed you attain, but how you feel about it personally. If you run a marathon in 2.5 hours, then it’s 2.5. If it is eight hours, then it’s eight. Even if you take the shuttle bus just to attend the after-party, people will cheer.¹

The machine didn’t like to see these thoughts. Because big systems don’t seem to work well when everybody moves at their own pace. Just think of highway traffic.

But while some of the people around us gave in and lost their pace of life, we didn’t.

We didn’t let them distract us.

We just opted for our own speed, and, in that sense, we became anarchists. Not of the kind that throws bombs and burns cars. But of the kind that takes responsibility for their own lives and their own speed and their own time, and of the kind that create their own rules that serve them while not harming others.

This is the nature of friendly anarchism, and it’s the essence of living life at tempo giusto. In other news, it looks as if light just became slow. Astounding, and yet another proof.

1. I did that in Berlin, recently.

The story goes like this: A class of seventh graders travels from Bogotá to the Colombian Amazon and goes for a hike. Before leaving, their guide advises them to respect the indigenous elders and the spirits of the forest. Everybody nods when listening about the gruesome creatures, just one boy laughs. It’s the same boy that almost wets his pants at night when sleeping outside in the jungle, terrorized by a gnome in a tree, watching him. Only after the indigenous elder arrives and does some arcane ritual, the gnome leaves and the boy falls asleep.

Most of us will smile about this story. Childish imagination goes a long way when you’re camping far out in the jungle, having nothing but trees and birds and strange insects around you. And yet, it’s not the only one I’ve heard.

There are the three guys who went to spend a night at a canyon in Southern Colombia, known to be a place of the Dead. Before dawn, all three of them felt the irresistible urge to jump down the abyss. Two of them did and died, the third one survived to tell the story.

Then, there’s the German professor that goes to China to work. After a couple of weeks, his wife suffers from a strange illness, and his job is jeopardized. Problems accumulate until at last they follow their neighbors’ advice and contract a shaman to do a week-long cleaning ritual at their house. Immediately after that, the professor gets promoted and the illness goes away.

Good luck? A shaman with close contacts at the local university? I’m not sure about it. Sometimes, rationality limits our worldview. I say this as someone who was denied membership in the protestant church as a school kid – while the alleged reason was a bureaucratic error, I still believe that they didn’t want a member who would probably criticize more than pray. And while I never was a good natural scientist, I generally felt comfortable defending a position of healthy agnosticism.

My personal vision changed when I was invited to a chief’s birthday in the rain forest and saw a witch sitting up in a tree, looking at a few of us while we were chilling out under the star-lit sky. I would have blamed the coca-chewing and the tobacco-sniffing, but there where no psychedelics involved. What’s worse, the guy next to me saw her, too. He even described her the same way, and somehow I just won’t believe that the chief had prepared a wily video installation in the middle of the jungle only to fool us.

What should we make of this?

Your conclusions, as always, are yours to draw. As for me, I believe there is another side to things, a side that science cannot describe, measure, and analyze – yet?! Maybe so. Maybe one day we will find a tool in order to do so.

Until then, I prefer not making fun about the gnomes while I’m in the jungle, and get my house unhexed in case I ever move to China. The cost of doing so is low, and the benefits may be quite big. As far as I’m concerned, this is practical economics applied to real life.

Remember the stories of American natives, giving away their treasures to the conquerers that had arrived to colonize them? Unassuming of what was coming, many Indians were happy to trade their gold, their cities, and ultimately their sovereignty for mirrors and necklaces. And every school kid is astonished to hear about people exchanging their highest treasures for something ultimately worthless.

Of course, the Indians didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know about the value gold and pearls had for their visitors, and they didn’t know about the greed their initial generosity would trigger. Anyway, most school kids assume, weren’t they also stupid? Something like that could never happen to us! We know about the value of the things we own, and we would never give them away carelessly. Or, would we?

I often have to think of the Indians when I see how people can’t wait to buy the newest gadgets or pass hours in shopping malls in order to relax after work: Be it an iPad or a new pair of shoes, we are crazy to get it.

Do people really know how much their shopping is worth? In reality, most of the things we buy are the mirrors and necklaces of our times – and we decide to exchange our lives for them. Instead of making use of the time we are granted on this planet, we rather fill it with meaningless work in order to get the money to buy meaningless stuff, in order to experience meaningless entertainment and forget about our meaningless relationships.

But it’s just a bit of retail therapy, you might say. What’s wrong with having a big and shiny flatscreen TV, a new pair of shoes, a large DVD collection?

Only you can give the answer, and it’s quite easy to tell: When was the last time you took a hike through the forest close to your home, or went for a surf? When was the last time you spent talking to a friend or just a random stranger until dawn, without being interrupted by the sound of a ringing cellphone? When was the last time you cooked delicious food with your family, the last time you spent time playing with your kids without looking at the clock?

All these experiences don’t cost any money. They are right here, you just have to go for them. So, what are they worth to you? Are they inferior to spending the days at your job and the nights watching yet another episode of Lost? In that case, retail therapy wins. If not, shouldn’t you think about resisting mirrors and necklaces and take your life back? No charges will be applied to your credit card. All it takes is to make a decision.

There is something about being a normal person that’s comforting. I know that, because apart from living frugally in the Caribbean as a self-employed dilettante, I’m a quite normal person, enjoying quite normal things. Okay, I’m no television and football fan, like most males in my age, and I hate cars. But I enjoy Hollywood cinema and cold beer, so there you have it. We’re all normal (as we’re all weird), to a certain extent.

The comforting thing about normality is this: If you are normal and enjoy normal things, you don’t stand out. You don’t have to worry, you don’t have to care. You don’t have to demonstrate against the government, because you like the normal way things are going. You don’t have to eat healthier, because you’re okay with having a normal figure and a normal life expectancy. You don’t have to kill yourself at work, because you come along with a normal paycheck, and you’re happy with your children going to a normal school.

The problem is that normality can also be a comforting way of ignoring our problems and making them worse. It can become normal to see your uncle drink half a bottle of whisky each day, but in reality, he is becoming an alcoholic. It can become normal to read that each year there are less albacore tunas caught in the Mediterranean sea, but in reality, we are extinguishing them. It could even become normal to see BP destroy our oceans because of unbelievable greed, but in reality, it’s not. It’s doing the wrong thing – and it’s us who are doing it, it’s us who are responsible, because we are living a lifestyle of unsustainability that has become our current normality.

Alcoholics, extinction of species, and the pollution of our planet caused by our addiciton to oil may be as normal as underarm hair. But just because it’s “normal”, we don’t have to accept it. If things were different, why would we shave our armpits? Why would we invent pain killers, if pain is something completely normal? Why bother about using condoms, if AIDS is normal?

Normality doesn’t exist. It’s always a question of our point of view and our interpretation of reality. Whatever we are doing (or not doing) that feels wrong, we are free to change it at any moment of our lives – even if it appears to be normal. We may as well start here and now.