Tom Hodgkinson

Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.

We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.

Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.

Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.

Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane __xperiences_ which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That__ not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.

Career is just posh slavery.

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork?