“Low-Revenue Loafing”

The Times goes a long way in investigating a pet peeve of ours: the conspicuous weekday idling of the idle rich:

New York is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.

Still, a fair portion of the city’s employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flâneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.

All of them – superrich, rich or merely upper middle class – have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.

The Times identifies three categories of Loafer: the sons & daughters of the superrich, who really should hide themselves; American Dream-worthy refugees from the rat race who live off of earned income, e.g., the fortunate beneficiaries of the 1990s tech bubble; and unlikely retirees, generally those who put in excrutiatingly long hours in their 20s and 30s in order to walk away from it all in their 40s.

Hearty big-cheer props to the Times for looking a little deeper into this — next stop, the trendy outer-borough cafes which I continue to scratch my head over when I see them packed in the middle of the day.