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Bertrand Russell’s ‘In Praise Of Idleness’ feels startlingly alive because it attacks the moral worship of work. Written in the 1930s, the essay argues that leisure, thought, and pleasure are not signs of weakness, but conditions for civilisation. Russell’s point is not that effort has no value. It is that a society obsessed with labour produces tired people, a shallow culture and very little free imagination in public life again today.