Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It was published by Abacus in 2003 and collects Dyer’s travel writing from the late 1990s and early 2000s — though “travel writing” barely describes what these essays do. Each piece is set in a different location (New Orleans, Amsterdam, Cambodia, Rome, Libya, Detroit, Indonesia, the Black Rock Desert) and each uses the occasion of travel to explore something else: boredom, drug experiences, the impossibility of authentic experience in a world already saturated with representation, the comedy of tourists seeking transcendence.
The title captures Dyer’s characteristic mixture of spiritual aspiration and comic self-deprecation: he wants transcendence but can’t be bothered to do the work; he travels to extraordinary places but brings his own restlessness and dissatisfaction with him; he seeks enlightenment but finds only more amusing forms of confusion. The humor is relentless and self-directed — Dyer is the opposite of the heroic traveler, instead presenting himself as lazy, drug-addled, and perpetually disappointed.
Yet beneath the comedy is something genuine: a real interest in what consciousness is and how it can be altered, a real engagement with the places he visits (his descriptions are precise and evocative despite his protestations of inattention), and a real philosophical curiosity about what travel means in a postmodern world. The essays hover between nihilism and wonder, and it is this tension — the refusal to choose between them — that gives the book its distinctive energy.
Collecting Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
First edition (Abacus/Little, Brown, London, 2003): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First UK edition: $15–$35
- First US edition (Pantheon, 2003): $10–$25