In Praise of Idleness: Aging and the Morality of Inactivity

This essay explores the cultural meanings and implications of “activity” and “idleness” in order to interrogate the repercussions of the persistent stigmatization of inactive bodies that cannot or will not be properly activated, according to medical, political, economic, and gerontological discourses. Older bodies are especially at risk of censure within these discourses of activation, which privilege the imperatives of youthful vigor, activity, and speed. The essay concludes by looking to fictional treatments of old age that imagine alternative perspectives on the idleness associated with late-life impairment—in particular the filmThe Straight Story, directed by David Lynch, and Marilynne Robinson's novelGilead—proposing that such texts offer narratives of fullness and quietude that implicitly challenge the denigration of inactivity as unhealthy disengagement.