Underlying Idle Theory is the incomprehension and disquiet that this writer felt, looking on this industrious world. Technology, as he saw it, was meant to free men from work. The whole point, he felt, of yoking an ox to a plough, was to get the ox to perform the work of turning earth which would otherwise have had to be carried out by men with spades and hoes. And those spades and hoes were themselves tools which enabled men to dig the soil more effectively and speedily than they ever could with bare hands. And yet this has not happened.
Men work just as hard as they ever did.
In Western societies, instead of technology bringing leisure, it appears instead to have increased the pace of life, so that it has become ever more frenetic, hurried, leisureless. For them, the whole point of spades and hoes and oxen and tractors was not to reduce the labour of men, but to increase production. If a spade enabled a man to dig a field in half the time it took for him to dig it with bare hands, they had it that a man could dig two fields in the same time, and produce twice the crop. And with yoked oxen he could plough ten fields. And with a tractor he could plough a hundred.