The Right to Beautiful Things

A call to slow down, rethink our work ethic, and reclaim life beyond productivity

At the intersection of Bullshit Jobs, Byung-Chul Han, and Jenny Odell: a philosophical essay driven by a young, literary, media-savvy voice, speaking to readers facing burnout, precarity, and the colonization of attention—and seeking the Joy Of Missing Out.

Inspired by Emil Goldman’s defence of “the right of all bodies to beautiful, radiant things”, Juan Evaristo Valls Boix offers a luminous and provocative essay for an age of exhaustion. Against a culture obsessed with work, performance, growth and self-improvement, he argues for the urgent need to reclaim everything that cannot be measured by productivity: beauty, thought, friendship, literature, pleasure, idleness, and time freely wasted.

At the heart of the book is his original defence of “lazy rights”: the right to laziness, to strike, to retirement, to the city, and to literature. These are not simply rights to rest before returning to work, but rights to a life no longer governed by usefulness — a life based on slowness, care, interdependence and shared pleasure. They are the “beautiful things”: those that serve no purpose and yet sustain us.

Both accessible and intellectually ambitious, The Right to Beautiful Things speaks to modern, curious, reflective and culturally engaged readers, while also reaching a broader audience increasingly hungry for another way of living.

In a way, Juan Evaristo is our Byung-Chul Han: a young intellectual who moves effortlessly between aesthetics, political philosophy, and social criticism, with a voice closely attuned to the concerns of Millennials and Gen Z.

CONTENTS

• The Horizontal Condition

• Vindication of the Rights of the Idlers

• The Right to Idleness

• The Right to Strike

• The Right to Retirement

• The Right to the City

• The Right to Literature

• Coda on the Leisurely Life