These are not good times for the self-confessed idler.

Idlers don’t exist, for a start – they’re “shirkers” now, enemy of the hardworking “strivers”.

What makes one a shirker is not entirely clear, but sitting around strumming a ukulele of an afternoon is probably a bit suspect.

Still, this is no deterrent to ukulele aficionado Tom Hodgkinson. He and Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded The Idler magazine in 1993 at the tail end of Thatcherism – another period where people weren’t exactly encouraged to lie around smelling flowers. He is used to being on the wrong side of governmental mores.

Inspired by the likes of Samuel Johnson, who championed the importance of leisure time in the 18th century, the magazine was launched to show that there was more to life than work and that laziness doesn’t have to be a negative idea.

Hodgkinson had hoped some of these ideas might have stuck. “I thought then there was something wrong with all the competitiveness and hurrying about and I assumed things would get better. Actually, it seems to have got worse. People feel they have to work all the time and, especially with the rise of the internet, we’re hardly ever ‘off’ any more.”

Even he isn’t immune. When we speak, he’s bombing up the motorway from his home in North Devon for a meeting in London about the Idler Academy, set up in 2010 to further the magazine’s aims.

He’s been up since six; with three kids, a truly idle life becomes almost impossible.

There’s also the small matter of earning some money. Despite his books How To Be Free and How To Be Idle promoting the value of self-sufficiency and managing on little cash, it seems the reality is proving a little harder than anticipated.

“The idea of bohemia at 25 is very attractive. I had friends going into the City or into service and I thought ‘How square!’, it just seemed appalling. But when you’re 45 and have three children and you’re scraping around for freelance work you can’t help but think, ‘Hmm, maybe I made a mistake!’ I’d probably be on good money by now if I’d gone into a ‘proper’ profession. But then again, you have to go in to work every day for 20 years.”

Hodgkinson’s driving aim has always been to avoid going into work. Like Sinatra and his regrets, he’s had a few – there was a summer working in a factory and a “miserable”

period when he was employed as a researcher at the Sunday Mirror – but since 1997, he’s proud to say he’s never had a proper job. “Maybe I’ll have to in the future. I hope not.”

He’s not sure where his aversion to offices began but once it took hold, it wouldn’t let go. The lightbulb moment came when he stopped feeling guilty about it.

“I’d started looking at the essays Dr Johnson wrote on idling. He’d take ages to get up but then have this intense period of working to a deadline.

Once he got going, like a racehorse, he went for it and my own working methods were a bit like that. Then I came across the Greeks, who believed work was something to be avoided where possible.

It was something you had slaves to do for you and if you had to do it yourself, it was only to create more leisure time for yourself.”

There is no achievement without effort, of course, and Hodgkinson has never denied the work involved in writing his books or editing a magazine.

It’s more about keeping the balance and, again, that’s something he’s struggling with at the moment.

“All the things we want to do with the academy – the bookshop, the coffee, the lectures – they’re all beautiful, romantic ideas but there’s a lot of work involved in making them happen. We started the academy as a pop-up at festivals and enjoyed it so much we thought we’d try to make it a permanent reality. In 2010 we went to see an estate agent and from that moment on it’s been really stressful.

“But if you’re too purist about these things, you’ll never get anything done. If you’re running a shop it’s quite good to have people in nine to five, five days a week.

One festival we went to had this really laidback food stall that was so laidback I had to wait an hour while they kept forgetting my order because they were stoned.”

Despite railing against such things in the past, he admits he’d have preferred to have been served by cheerful, efficient, hardworking staff.

The argument for an active life over a contemplative life has been going on for thousands of years, of course; Hodgkinson isn’t naïve enough to think he’s nailed it. But at least he’s trying.

“All we’re saying is that leisure time is precious and we should appreciate it and use it. Maybe you could learn calligraphy or read Socrates – it doesn’t have to lead to anything but it’s an important part of life to have these hobbies and I think we’re in danger of devaluing them.

We have a lot of leisure time if you think about it – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to watch so much telly.”

At home in Devon with his wife Victoria (who had a job when the couple met but was sacked soon after and ended up starting her own literary festival in Clerkenwell), Hodgkinson always makes time for long baths and bouts of baking bread while attempting to ignore his children. Well, not ignore them exactly but to let them make their own entertainment.

As he laid out in How To Be An Idle Parent, leaving kids alone can be a win-win situation, “Both in terms of enjoying everyday life and also for their self-reliance and independence”.

But idling is certainly hard work at times. “Now I run the academy I have the worst of both worlds,” he grumbles, “Loads of work and no money. Gavin and I thought we’d become tremendously rich doing very little work when we founded The Idler but it’s the complete opposite.”

l Tom Hodgkinson appears at Idlers Of The Enlightenment, A Symposium at Angel House, Brunswick Terrace, Hove, today at 4.15pm, as part of the Hendricks Carnival Of Knowledge, part of this year’s Brighton Fringe