In 1999, crowds of art lovers, many of them baffled, filed into London’s Tate gallery to view My Bed, a work quickly established as one of the most iconic and notorious of our age. Tracey Emin’s installation painstakingly recreated her bed as it appeared after an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, triggered by the end of a relationship. A disordered tangle of used and dirty stockings, towels and sheets, the undersheet spilling freely over the bed’s base, was bordered by the accumulated debris of an exhausted life. This was not a bed of peaceful rest, airy dreams or frenzied coupling, but of illness, exhaustion and despair. The intoxicants and condoms strewn around conveyed not a lively appetite, but a quest for physical and psychic numbness, plunging us into a state the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg called “weariness of the self”.

Ehrenberg diagnosed this weariness as the essential malaise of our time. He described a chronic incapacity arising from a state of perpetual work – not only the long hours spent in waged employment, but the state of permanent busyness induced by daily demands to act and consume. This has been accentuated, since Ehrenberg published his book, by the 24/7 imperatives of online life: follow, like, update, upload, link and (of course) buy.

This culture induces an intense yearning for the state of rest it denies us. Driven by a spirit of anxiously competitive workaholism, or by the simple need to survive, millions of men and women spend a vast proportion of their lives at work. Advertisements for energy drinks and flu remedies promise to power through illness and exhaustion and spare us (and our employers) a day off. And as work is proclaimed as high value, non-work is loudly condemned – in shrill tabloid fantasies of welfare scroungers and migrants enjoying easy lives at our expense, in the drive of western governments both left and right of centre to ensure we remain in work, in the withholding and denial of disabled welfare benefits.

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In my daily work as a psychoanalyst, this atmosphere of enforced, anxious overactivity pervades my consulting room. I listen to men and women pressed in from all sides by the demands to work harder as employees, as parents, as consumers, yearning for a little silence and reclusion, a momentary break in the flow of noise.

Across contemporary culture, we find this condition expressed in myriad forms and voices. Sifting through these voices, we can discern four broad and frequently recurrent character types: the burnout, derailed from his blind impulsion to act and achieve by a sudden, overwhelming need to stop, to which he can only blankly surrender; the slob, who turns lassitude, gluttony and indifference to self and world into an elective way of life; the daydreamer, who eludes the burdens of daily life by taking off into the far reaches of the imagination; and the slacker, who turns an aversion to the real world and its demands into a concrete ethos and lifestyle. In these figures, we can make out currents of resistance, both brash and subtle, to the rule of blind, incessant activity.

There are few more powerfully concentrated images of the burnout than the absent occupant of Emin’s bed. But if My Bed could be said to have a fictional analogue, I suggest we’d find it in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, published last year.

Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator, a woman in her early 20s whose parents have died, is already weary of the dubious, too easily available enticements of art, sex and money. She resolves to self-induce a year-long sleep, punctuated only by short waking intervals to feed herself. She is, to recall Ehrenberg, weary of the self, investing all her energy and ingenuity in a scheme to reduce her bodily and mental agitation to near zero. Even before this experiment in self-annulment, she has started “hibernating”, downing sleeping pills, letting her muscles waste and watching vapid movies on VHS: “I couldn’t stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I’d get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself.”

Moshfegh’s narrator recalls an earlier fictional shut-in: Jean Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysman’s cult 1884 novel À Rebours, or Against Nature. Des Esseintes’s tragicomic trials centre on his desperate attempts to return his body and mind, ravaged by sexual and narcotic debauchery, to a state of undisturbed peace. He leaves the fleshpots of Paris for his quiet villa in the suburbs, where he tries and fails to forge a life of monastic abstemiousness.

These characters are caught in a tormenting predicament: however hard they try to sink into oblivion, they cannot help feeling the scratch of worldly demands and desires, giving rise to a state of heightened enervation that ruins both work and relaxation. This is the state of burnout, a term first used in a diagnostic sense by the German-American psychologist Herbert J Freudenberger in 1974, to refer to the growing phenomenon of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress”.

Freudenberger found burnt-out workers running on empty, depleted of all but the most minimal internal resources. Their exhaustion led to an intense longing for a state of rest, alongside the sense that it can’t be attained, that some anxiety or distraction won’t let them go. The human organism, it seems, is not hospitable to the zero state, however much it might desire it.

Burning out involves a distressingly long and arduous route to the state of inactivity, which is then spoiled by nervousness, shame and guilt. The scandalous courage of the slob, in contrast, is to embrace the inertial state and openly reject diligence and responsibility.

Freud often pointed to the erect posture as the definitive evolutionary achievement of the human being. Straightening our backs and tilting our chins up towards the firmament, we freed our heads from the disgusting and arousing smells of our intimate bodily selves, acquiring the dignity, order and discipline of form. The slob disturbs us because he puts us in touch with that formless, muddy region of the self we thought we’d risen above. We feel it when we sink exhausted into the sofa, abandoning ourselves to gravity’s downward pull. We feel it when our minds yield to the sludgy undertow of blank stupidity, when all our inner voice can do is hum moronic advertising jingles.

No wonder the slob became the bete noire of Enlightenment thinking; inducing numbness and apathy, laziness undoes its cherished ideals of autonomy and moral responsibility. The most celebrated and ambiguous instance of this hostility to laziness is found in Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, a fictionalised dialogue with a notorious Parisian music tutor and society freeloader, posthumously published in 1805. Their discussion in a cafe quickly turns to the difficulties of Rameau, who supports his family by sponging off the wealthy – they tend to eject him soon after his amusement value has been exhausted. Diderot listens to his defence of his amoral, self-indulgent and thoroughly useless life with a show of outward disgust, leavened by a surreptitious amusement, even secret admiration.

Diderot’s case for self-reliance and honesty is oddly flat next to Rameau’s seductive advocacy of slobbish abandon: “Drink good wine, blow yourself out with luscious food, have a tumble with lovely women, lie on soft beds.” The book puts us in touch with the Rameau concealed in us all, the big entitled baby who rails against the obstacles reality puts in the way of his contentment, who doesn’t see why he should be asked to work and be responsible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I was rescued, not for the first time in my life, by a movie.’ Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

Let other people do it all so I don’t have to – Rameau’s watchword is also that of a more familiar and contemporary folk-heroic slob: Homer Simpson. Homer is a pop-cultural incarnation of what the French writer Georges Bataille called the spirit of “pure expenditure”: he wants what he wants right now, in limitless quantities. Homer and his friends are lazy slobs, for whom the will to consume always trumps the obligation to produce. The lurid glow of warm colour suffusing The Simpsons is a kind of atmospheric analogue to the nirvana of inanity induced by the abundance of Duff Beer and Lard Lad Donuts. Homer, like Snoopy, Garfield or Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges, is the vicarious channel for the life of aimless sloth many of us would secretly like to live and have been forced to renounce.

The slob resists the world’s demands by succumbing to the downward pull of gravity. The daydreamer does so by refusing it, by floating airily above her daily reality. Daydreaming is a refusal to equate life with quotidian existence.

Why would anyone want to retreat into the clouds and abandon the urgent claims of life here below? In one of his scandalous inversions of received wisdom, Oscar Wilde suggested that action was the real refuge of “people who have nothing whatsoever to do”. “To do nothing at all,” he adds, “is the most difficult thing in the world,” because it deprives us of the easy evasions of busyness and purpose. Should we doubt this, we need only glance around a cafe, tube carriage or family dinner table and observe the reflexive flight of the eyes and hands around us into the anxious distractions of emails, box sets and Candy Crush.

Occasionally, someone comes along and makes us question the superiority of action over contemplation. Take Emily Dickinson, who spent the largest part of her adult life locked in her Amherst bedroom, scratching out nearly 2,000 poems. She opens poem 657 with this provocative declaration: “I dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose – / More numerous of Windows – / Superior – for Doors –”. Bound up with this dreamy reclusion is Dickinson’s refusal of marriage, even to the man she was evidently in love with. Withdrawn into the quiet repose of her locked room, “doing nothing”, she can venture infinitely further and more boldly than a woman bounded by the obligations and conventions of 19th century marriage.

The first year of my PhD was a time of increasing anxiety and depressive drift. The illusion of complete daily freedom was fun only for as long as I could forget that I was supposed to be doing something. The growing pile of books and scholarly journals induced in me not productive urgency but debilitating paralysis. I was rescued, not for the first time in my life, by a movie: Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker, which I watched enraptured in the back row seat of a sticky floored fleapit.

It didn’t take me long to see the aimlessness of my own life reflected in the funhouse mirror of Linklater’s film, comprised of weird, randomly connected episodes from the makeshift subcultures of Austin, Texas, teeming with amateur metaphysicians, tinkerers, petty criminals, anarchists and poseurs, linked only by their uncompromising renunciation of “the kind of work you have to do to earn a living”.

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The film’s title seemed to allude less to its characters than to itself, to its own slack relationship to its subjects, at once fascinated and distracted, alive and lackadaisical. Watching Slacker opened up a different way of relating to my own life, one that wasn’t measured and valued by externally imposed targets and achievements. It offered a glimpse of what Roland Barthes called “idiorrhythmy”, “where each subject lives according to his own rhythm”. To live life as a slacker means to refuse the regimentation of time and space by the impersonal forces of work and leisure, giving yourself over to the pace and style of the impulses, curiosities and desires unique to you. But it’s equally a social ideal, whereby the rhythms of all our individual lives co-exist without encroaching on each other.

No doubt there comes a time when your idiorrhythm can no longer be isolated from everyone else’s, when it must reckon with the externally imposed rhythms of an institutional day or the competing idiorrhythms of lovers or children or pets. But surely this is when it’s most important to keep hold of its spirit of indiscipline, its commitment to activity, and inactivity, without purpose or aim.

Perhaps all of us, not least the good citizens and hard workers, have much to learn from the slacker and her counterparts. If we allow our whole selves to be absorbed by the demands and agendas of a persecutory to-do list scribbled by others, we will quickly lose the very dimension of life that makes it worth living.

• Not Working by Josh Cohen is published by Granta. To order a copy for £13.19 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.