Doing nothing is a paradox: nothing is not an amount to be used up or an activity which can be completed. The unemployed who we spoke to repeatedly emphasized that they found time a burden. Here we might well turn to philosophers to unravel the conundrum – like the unemployed they often have a great deal of time on their hands but somehow do not enjoy it. In the late seventeenth century, Pascal opined that ‘all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’; indeed our interviewees stressed the difficulty of sitting quietly in a room alone. More recently, Wittgenstein said, ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present’. Yet jobseekers often describe their day-to-day existence as a sort of infinite time, where hours seem like an eternity. This is not an eternal bliss of present satisfaction but an undefined period of waiting to escape from an interminable predicament.

There is something perplexing, curious and enigmatic about the experience of doing nothing, feeling time slowly passing. However, there is no natural or neutral human experience of ‘doing nothing’; what matters decisively is how people think about the absence of defined activity. For the unemployed, what matters is how they are governed by the welfare state, that is, by the form of pastoral power which is exerted upon them. This is not just a personal problem, but a social issue. Contemporary states and international organizations such as the EU and OECD are concerned that long-term unemployment produces ‘subjective deterioration’, that is, decreased health, diminished future earnings, or lower educational attainment for children in ‘jobless households’. Their solution is to increase ‘activation’: more advice, training and pressure on the unemployed to attain work. This may have some effect, including increasing in-work poverty, but what it really does is intensify the negative experience of unemployment. Problematically, states react to an economic or social problem with measures that are only marginally effective in reducing the numbers of long-term unemployed and really make the experience worse.