This article was written in light of the labor crisis afflicting the world in the neoliberal era and the busy and catatonic nature of life today, with work having taken over all of people’s time and at the same time losing its purpose. But the article does not focus on work but rather on what it tries to clear the world of: idleness. It offers a conceptual discussion of idleness as a historic concept that operates in relation to categories of work, leisure, asceticism and strike. The starting point for the discussion of the relationship between idleness, work and politics today is potentiality as non-action, a concept coined by Giorgio Agamben, which is critical for understanding idleness as a form of passive potentiality. From there the article turns to showing how idleness relates to the order of work and leisure; how it operates in relation to the desire to retire from the exhausting neoliberal social order; and how it relates to the major political act of the strike. He examines the future and the present of the global world as a time of idleness, of work whose purpose is the endless production of surplus and abstract value – capital – but which relates less and less to final purposes and value that has meaning outside of the economic logic of profit. Thus, work itself leads to resistances to the decree of work, which become more and more acceptable – to idleness. The starting point of the article is therefore the polyvalent politicization and disciplinization of idleness. All productivity is by essence the transformation of signs (materials, bodies, ideas) into meaning. The discussion of idleness – what is in opposition to the political and productive and negates itself before them – makes it meaningful, namely productive (by its nonproduction). The article works within that tension and observes the moment where idleness becomes productive and loses its “idleness.”