Of all the things sacrificed to public health in the last eighteen months, I think the one I regret the least is the default poolside Summer holiday. I first began to understand something about it, and the counter intuitive aspects of human happiness, on holiday in Cozumel, off the coast of Mexico, in 1999.
I was staying at an all-inclusive hotel, not the sort of thing I would normally have done, being more of a self-identified ‘traveller’ at the time, happier with ad-hoc hostels and thumbing from town to town. I immediately resented the little coloured wristband that alerted the staff to the level of service and the range of free cocktails I was entitled to. But this was the cheapest and easiest way to spend a week scuba diving, which I was eager to try.
So perhaps I was already inclined to despise many of the other residents, who seemed more at home, and on whom I projected a completely different set of motives to those which had brought me there. Lazier, more habitual, more self-indulgent motives.
Everyone else it seemed, was American, and they looked to me a pretty uniformly overweight, bovine, pampered bunch, radiating complacent entitlement to all the attentions the staff were happy to lavish on them. The obvious and visible distinction between the North American guests and the Central American staff only made the dynamic more distasteful in my severe, if unvocalised, judgement.
Perhaps it’s just me, perhaps everyone else lying there gently searing their epidermis in the sun, feels deeply at peace and is not having to suppress an urge to find something to do.
But the thing that really stuck out was that, of the two, the ones who were clearly having the most fun, were the Mexicans – the staff. The Americans seemed bored stiff. Bar stewards, waiters and pool boys alike seemed to be having the time of their lives, even as they turned the livestock over on their sun loungers like so many sausages and chops.
They grinned and laughed and initiated conversations and activities with the guests, with all the enthusiasm of prisoners granted a last-minute stay of execution, on condition of putting in a decent shift. And – despite my initial suspicions – not only when attending to the younger and lovelier of the punters. They were every bit as apparently enthusiastic about making the day of some 20-stone lobster of a Texas oil-man as they were his lithesome daughter.
It would be easy – and it was a temptation I fell into, frequently – to ascribe the surly disregard shown to their enthusiasm, to an endemic, cultural distortion that had taught the fat yanks it was no more than their due to be attended to by eager supplicants from South of the Border. But actually, I think what I was seeing was something more fundamental to human nature. It was the expression of the effect on one’s mood, of having nothing to do.
The discovery that self-reported happiness correlates with being lost in meaningful activity, rather than sun-drenched idleness, is now often credited to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his work on ‘Flow’. But this is largely to lend academic credibility to a tendency that has been plain to wise students of human nature for centuries.
‘Be not solitary, Be not idle’, advised Robert Burton, 400 years ago, in summary of his vast and magisterial Anatomy of Melancholy. His acolyte Samuel Johnson added what I consider to be a useful footnote – If you must be idle, be not solitary. If you must be solitary, be not idle. This advice is that little bit more easily followed, and I honestly doubt I have ever read wiser, and more earnest words.
Kipling – of course – had something to say on the matter, in a poem that I have read to my children with patient optimism on numerous occasions – The Camel’s Hump.
The Camel’s Hump is an ugly lump
Which you may well see at the zoo
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do…
Kipling’s suggested remedy was the morale-boosting equivalent of Keynes’s remedy for reversing a macro-economic slump – dig. Dig to no purpose other than to labour – till you gently perspire.
So, it is remarkable how often we either forget or studiously ignore this hard-won lesson in life, and happily commit ourselves to a fortnight’s inactivity every year to ‘recharge the batteries’ when it does no such thing. Or perhaps it’s just me, perhaps everyone else lying there gently searing their epidermis in the sun, feels deeply at peace and is not having to suppress an urge to find something to do.
After 18 months enforced redundancy, I at least am relieved and grateful that Edinburgh is once again hosting the world’s greatest arts festival this August, albeit in a rather reduced form. I am back spending Summer somewhere that I can be of some use. I may not be organising Aquarobics, or pouring out jug after jug of Drunken Monkeys for the poolside spectators, but at least I am once again on the active side of the divide, and ready to put on a show.
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