The dreamer, the absent-minded and the idle.

The dreamer sometimes falls into a well, but he is said to get out of it afterwards. And the absent-minded man has also in compensation, his lucid intervals. He is sometimes a person who has his reasons for being as he is, those are not always understood at first, or are unconsciously forgotten most of the time, from the lack of interest. A man who has been tossed to and fro for a long time, as if he were tossed on a stormy sea, at last reaches his destination: a man who seemed good for nothing and incapable of any emplyment, any function, ends in finding one, and becoming active and capable of action, he shows himself quite different from what he seemed at first. I write somewhat at random whatever comes to my pen. I should be very glad if you could see in me something besides an idle fellow.
Because there are two kinds of idleness, that form a great contrast. There is a man who is idle from laziness and from lack of character, from the baseness of nature. You may if you like take me for such a one.

Then there is the other sort of idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, yet does nothing because it is impossible for him to do anything, because he is seems to be imprisoned in some cage, because hes doe not posses what he needs to make him productive, because the fatality if circumstances bring him there: such a man does not always know what he could do, but he feels by instinct: all the same I am good for something, my life has an aim after all, I know that I might be quite a different man! How can I then be useful, of what service can I be! There is something inside of me, what can it be?

Excerpt from the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh edited by Mark Roskill for fellow citizens idling their youth away.