November 1: National Unawareness Day
01 November 2006
As a protest against the plague of awareness days, weeks and months that busybody charities and pressure groups are constantly foisting upon us, we at the Idler declare today, 1 November 2006, to be National Unawareness Day. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, as John Lennon wisely recommended. Forget it all, as Nietzsche counselled. Editor Tom Hodgkinson appeared today on Radio 4′s Today Programme to announce National Unawareness Day and we advise readers everywhere to go back to bed, go to the pub or doze off while reading a slim volume of verse.
"For Jerome, idleness had little in common with laziness. His notion of idleness in the world beyond his fiction was one of contemplative productivity with the minimum of fuss."