The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labour--idleness--was a condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of mans primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class--the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

--Tolstoy, War and Peace

Many people think that contemplative and scholarly occupations also consist in idleness, though they may be less inclined to consider this idleness irreproachable. As a teenager I was in fact constantly reproached for my idleness when I preferred to spend my time studying and building the foundations of learning--not without, of course, a great deal of (invisible) labor--rather than doing manual labor to earn a few bucks so I could drive a car, date girls, and get myself into trouble.

"Why don't you do some work instead of wasting all your time reading books?"

I always found this reproach extremely unreasonable. Luckily, I ignored it.