we're through being cool

Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein, published by Oxford University Press, 114pp, ISBN 0-19-516630-2

Having inhaled “Wittgenstein for Dummies, Non-Euclidean Geometry for Dummies, Aramaic for Dummies, Berg Operas for Dummies, Descartes for Dummies,” and “Toward Peace in the Middle East for Dummies,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein decided that not only did she know too much, but that what she knew amounted to a hill of beans. Which is when she decided to devote herself to Sloth, “the fastest-growing lifestyle movement in the world, and that's because it is completely doable. If you embrace sloth, it's the last thing you'll ever have to do again.”

Sixth in the Oxford University Press' spectacular Seven Deadly Sins series, Sloth is the funniest book I have read since David Sedaris' Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim . If not entirely original in pitch – Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “As one whose taste in mental states has always run largely toward the coma, I have very little patience with the current craze for self-awareness,” Sloth compensates with an oddly compelling and maternal tendresse : “There is no reason to glow with health and achievement. Glowing takes work. From this moment on, I want you to have the will to say ‘no' to ‘glow'.”

On page 14, Wasserstein diffuses potential accusations of hypocrisy - how can a true sloth be a crusader? (“First of all, I wrote this book entirely lying down. Second of all, I dictated half of it and my assistant made up the other half.”) She then introduces lethargiosis, the process of eliminating drive and that first, vital step in going sloth. So don't be good. Or bad. Sing sloth songs, sip the Breakfast of Non-Champions Milkshake, and indulge (“my Dead Sea moisturizing mask … will exfoliate your skin back to when you were still in the womb, [and] takes two days to apply and five days to congeal”).

Sloth offers more than an exquisite parody of the self-help genre – masked by wit, its philosophy is near-Buddhist in terms of the renunciation of desire. Just lose the yen. Why lift iron slabs in rotation at the gym? (“Have you ever been to a penal colony? That's what insane criminals are forced to do.”) Besides, the energy you'll save by loafing and not fulfilling anyone's expectations - even your own - “will make you feel years younger." She teaches us that revolutionaries from Washington to Lenin believed that the key to change is seizing the means to production, sagely adding: “I want you to seize the means of production in your own life and shut them down … you have the right to be lazy. You can choose not to respond. You can choose not to move.” And … I do.

Wasserstein's spin may be contemporary - Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slowness also celebrates languor - but meditations on the relationship between leisure and civility date back to Aristotelian Greece. In particular, Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness explains the role of the leisure class in the evolution of the arts and sciences - “it wrote the books, invented the philosophies” – holding that without it (and unlike TV producers), we would never have triumphed over barbarism.

Confronted by medical reports of sloth causing weight gain, weakness, constipation, and mental atrophy, Wasserstein rebuts: “To all of these lies, I say no one ever went to war because they were sloths. No one was ever murdered or killed in the name of sloth. Furthermore, sloths don't go on religious crusades … Hate takes energy. Destroying the ozone layer requires industry. Therefore, slothdom can save humanity.”

She has a point. While Edmund Burke was right in saying that for evil to triumph, it is necessary only for good men to do rien , it is also true that those who sleep three or four hours a night (Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great) should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery, never mind an actual nation. Wasserstein's evidence is strong: “Look at our friends from Enron - they could've benefited from a little sloth.”

Why run when you can sleep? (“If you feel like climbing Mt. Everest , remember, you've got a 50 percent chance of falling off and dying.”) And why feign interest in subjects about which you know nothing? (“I have also published my own evaluation of Middle East politics. In this surface examination, you will see there is absolutely no answer to this multifaceted question.”) Overachievers take note: “Shakespeare wrote so many plays that we don't really know if he actually wrote them all. Perhaps if he had rested a little bit more, there'd be less chitchat about Christopher Marlowe.”

Languidly, she argues that content is all that really counts. “Aren't you always happiest at the end of the day when your work is done ... everyone is fed, and it's time to veg out?” It's a seductive – and, to many, strangely troubling - tableau. But why complicate overly-complicated lives with guilt? In this spirit, Wasserstein shares a little trick she uses when she simply doesn't feel like working: “I shut my eyes, I go to sleep, and I play Muzak on my computer.”

She exhorts us all to put those sloth buttons on our chests and proudly go to bed instead. All systems no? “It's time to stop looking for answers. The answer is sloth.”

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian