In Praise of Idleness: Aging and the Morality of Inactivity

“DO YOU HAVE SITTING DISEASE?” THE PATHOLOGIZATION OF INACTIVITY

In July 2012, the Lancet published an analysis of global mortality data and self-reporting by test subjects in 122 countries that corroborates the association between sedentary lifestyles and premature mortality (I-Min Lee et al.). Entitled, “Effect of Physical Inactivity on Major Noncommunicable Diseases Worldwide: An Analysis of Burden of Disease and Life Expectancy,” the study found that “inactivity causes 9% … of premature mortality, or more than 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008” (219). As is often the case with provocative studies of health and illness, the Lancet paper was widely reported in the popular media. “Sedentary Lifestyle Can Kill” was the subsequent headline on the BBC News website (Walsh). Sensational scare tactics are a common strategy in the attempts to mobilize the majority of adults who fail to get the minimum amount of recommended exercise. In April of the preceding year, the New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?” (Vlahos). The danger posed by sitting has recently returned to prominence since the release of a study by University of Leicester and Loughborough University found that lengthy periods of sitting increase a person’s risk of disease and death, even if the person is active at other periods of the day (Wilmot et al., 2901). As a January 2013 Maclean’s article on the study proclaims, “Like obesity or smoking before it, sitting is the new plague, and not just because it can lead to deadly blood clots. Alarmingly, the latest research links it to obesity, diabetes and the major killers, heart disease and cancer. And exercising the recommended half-hour a day, while beneficial, isn’t enough to stave off the ill effects of sitting” (Lunau). The very posture has become pathologized; sitting is now a disease, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website. Such ubiquitous, anxiety-provoking reports that seek to admonish, even terrify their insufficiently active readers construct a hierarchy of lifestyles that pits activity, health, and movement against inactivity, disease, and stasis.

This is only a small sampling of the widespread popular reporting on the health risks associated with inactivity, a persistent preoccupation with inactive at-risk bodies that, I argue, expresses in medico-scientific terms, centuries-old associations between idleness and both physical and moral decrepitude. In this essay, I explore the cultural meanings and implications of “activity” and “idleness” in order to interrogate the repercussions of the persistent stigmatization of inactive aging bodies, particularly those older bodies that cannot or will not be properly activated according to medical, political, economic, and gerontological discourses that privilege activity as healthy, responsible, productive, and successful. I refer to these intersecting and interacting articulations of the virtue of activity as discourses of activation. As I demonstrate below, older bodies are especially at risk of censure within this discourse, which privileges the imperatives of youthful vigor, activity, and speed. I conclude by looking to fictional treatments of old age that imagine alternative perspectives on the idleness that comes with late-life impairment, in particular the film The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch, and Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. I propose that these texts offer narratives of fullness and quietude that implicitly challenge the denigration of inactivity as unhealthy disengagement. In these texts, older protagonists become avid observers of the world that at once includes and excludes them. For these characters, physical inactivity engenders opportunities for gazing, for reflecting, and for simply being that heightens rather than diminishes their engagement with the world and its inhabitants. These works offer an inspiring rebuttal to the morally inflected condemnation of idleness by proffering characters whose thoughtful watching is an implicit ethical challenge to the self-absorbed tendencies of activated bodies.

The correspondence between activity and morality has a long socioeconomic history manifest in capitalism. In his analysis of neoliberalism, David Harvey highlights the primacy of active, independent subjects unencumbered by obligations to community, government, or family in capitalist society: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that...