How to be Free Tom Hodgkinson Hamish Hamilton, 340pp, £14.99 ISBN 0241143217

It can't have escaped Tom Hodgkinson's notice that this book, about throwing off what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of expectation, duty and guilt, and instead doing only what you want to do, is being published in the long run-up to Christmas. I can just imagine the Idler editor and - if we're to believe the portrait that adorns the book jacket - semi-pro ukulele player rejoicing in the prospect of the entire nation simply giving up on the charade and causing Bernard Matthews, Argos and the Norwegian fir industry to go bankrupt.

Although Hodgkinson is pink-cheeked and clean-cut in this picture, at heart he is a cross between a punk and what was once - back in the early 1990s, when throngs of young people could be seen in town centres sporting striped mohair jumpers and matted hair with "A for Anarchy" symbols shaved into the back - called a crusty. Crusties listened to bands such as The Levellers, whose biggest hit had a chorus that went: "There's only one way of life, and that's your own, your own, your own."

The problem with crusties, as revealed by that awful song, is that they're really just Thatcherites with an aversion to soap. They are, like the pre-Cameron Tories, classic liberals in that they cannot stand anything to do with the state. Hodgkinson, who was born in 1968 and has raffish friends like Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, reserves his greatest scorn for that saloon-bar curmudgeon's favourite, Health and Safety. "Smash the fetters of fear!" he exclaims, complaining that a planned party at his local village hall never got off the ground because of idler-threatening bureaucracy.

"Governments do too much and they do most of it badly," he states with the certainty of someone who has never benefited from state intervention, ever. In his view, that means there's no point in voting because "the government always gets in". "We pay the government between a quarter and a half of our income for the privilege of being patronised and bossed around." And for the privilege of receiving a free heart bypass when we've spent 50 years eating quail and drinking port, of course. But he doesn't mention that bit.

A philosopher of good living, he wants us all to take up bareback horse-riding instead of driving cars, and to live for the moment in a society where we are encouraged to pre-plan and micro-manage far into the future (except, that is, if we are shopping, when the message transforms mysteriously into "Spend like there's no tomorrow"). He writes in a witty, aphoristic style that is mostly good-humoured and encouraging, which bolsters his central argument that, seeing as life is essentially absurd, we may as well be happy all the time.

However, Hodgkinson's own jolly mood is not permanent. "The countryside is now merely a provider of views to the cowering suburbanites," he writes of middle-aged couples who drive to beauty spots in order to share sandwiches and silent companionship. That's the kind of statement that John Carey's scathing book The Intellectuals and the Masses was written for. There is a correct and incorrect way to enjoy the countryside and, in Hodgkinson's view, most of us pick the wrong one. He's only trying to help us, you see, but he wonders if there's really any point.

The writer describes the mortgage-paying, car-driving majority variously as "docile", "frightened little rabbits" and "poor suckers". Don't get me wrong: I hate cars. He does, too, making the rueful observation that "they are one of the most deadly things about modern life and kill 3,500 people each year in the UK". I wonder, then, how he feels about the compulsory wearing of seatbelts - surely the initiative of a killjoy Health and Safety officer?

Luckily, Hodgkinson displays enough of the punk-rock quality of what Billy Bragg calls "socialism of the heart" to even things out. He is not the first creatively inclined thinker to romanticise the life of the medieval artisan - John Ruskin and William Morris got there before him - but he can be forgiven for that purely because it sounds so good. Rightly, he points out that the lack of skills required in a mechanised and computerised society saps purpose and meaning from working life.

Instead, he says, we should be investing our time in doing things by hand. The sense of satisfaction from growing your own vegetables can hardly be bettered, and you're lowering Tesco's profits into the bargain. His observations on our apparently willing submission to credit and consumer culture in general are extremely pertinent, and his final commandment - to "PLAY" - can't really be argued with in a society where the boss can reach you by phone or by Blackberry at any time of day or night. He just needs to go a little more lightly on the "unthinking masses".

Lynsey Hanley's "Estates: an intimate history" is published by Granta in January

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