what if you just did nothing?

i tried doing nothing so you wouldn't have to

here we are now, nearing the end of august. the end of august also means (i hope) that the heat waves and heat domes are done. i used to really like summer, but it’s been so hot some years that you can’t do much outside noon onward.

this morning, after i made breakfast for my son, fed the dogs and the cat, i went outside on the still dew-damp wood, and laid down on the deck.

i just laid there. i let the wood hold me. i listened to a random bird scream. i listened to some overly eager neighbour mow their lawn. i listened to a dog somewhere barking at something. only one dove was brave enough to stay on the electrical wire while i was out. i’m not even that close to them, but apparently i possess a formidable enough figure to scare them away. what does it mean if the birds of peace run away from you? i try not to take it personally. regardless, it was just delightfully pleasant. laying there.

i’m trying to remember when doing nothing became a fad. did it start before 2020? i can’t remember. jenny odell’s How To Do Nothing was published in 2020 to a lot of fanfare, not the least because the book’s cover is GORGEOUS. my equally gorgeous friend, B, loaned me her copy. i found a 2019 article by Tracy Chabala and one by Susan Weinschenk for Psychology Today, Arthur Brooks for the Atlantic in 2022, one by Kate Neville this year (2024 for anyone who finds this in 2025+) in The Walrus…so the do nothing train pulled out of the station around 2019 or so, let’s say.

some people consider ‘nothing’ to mean, literally nothing. i suppose that’s fine, but for argument’s sake, i’m always doing something, even when i’m doing nothing. letting the dogs out! (or in!) for the fiftieth time! making a cup of tea. tidying something. admiring the cloud shapes. i suppose nothing means different things to different people, but the key being, not everything must be done in a rush and not everything you do has to be productive.

i don’t think i need to rehash the reasons for this culture, which has been attributed to everything from the cultural capital of rush/business to Puritan roots. myself, i prefer to blame capitalism, because i am a millennial and i have previously read that millennials are more likely to blame capitalism for social issues. so i do. vulture capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, and stakeholder capitalism. i consider these my three key villains. bad villains though. not the anti-hero, mostly sexy, still kind of rooting for them villains. the actual awful, no-good, rotten, must eradicate them type villains. real bad guys.

i was going to change that to ‘real bad people’, but then i remembered that back-to-office policies are causing a significant number of women to leave the workforce, including c-suite women, so i’m just going to leave it. they probably are men, statistically speaking.

in her aforementioned book, Jenny Odell opens the book with, “nothing is harder to do than nothing” (2020: 4). for Odell, the idea of doing nothing is a bit tongue-in-cheek. what she is trying to do, at its root, is to recognize the real social and environmental injustices that fuel the attention economy of social media. the platforms that we use to meet with each other online to hash, rehash, yell into the void, yell at each other, profit from the fact that we don’t have the space or time or sometimes the attention, for the true nuance required to talk about ourselves, our thoughts, our opinions, our social and political issues. the collapse of the ability to provide context and background to our thoughts and opinions and experiences makes everything less understandable. easier to misinterpret.

doing nothing can mean moving her (our) attention from one framework (like the attention economy of our social media, in which WE are the product) to another space that gives her (us) time and space and the attention to think.

there was a study by Wilson et al., in 2014 that demonstrated that some participants would rather shock themselves with a jolt of electricity than sit alone with their own thoughts. even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves. fascinating.

About the study’s findings, Jonathan Schooler, a psych prof who studies consciousness remarked, "I found it quite surprising and a bit disheartening that people seem to be so uncomfortable when left to their own devices; that they can be so bored that even being shocked seemed more entertaining, but I can't help but feel that there has to be more to the story. I'm confident that there are conditions in which at least a subsample of the population enjoys this quiet opportunity for self-reflection." (you can read the rest of the article in Science).

if you’re thinking this is the place we talk about meditation, you’d be wrong. there are enough articles everywhere on that. and i am convinced by the science, so i have nothing else to really say about it. do i do it? no. should i? absolutely. it stays on my goals list with ‘drink more water’ and i roll it over year after year as a resolution - we’re all just surviving here folks. i’m out here flailing around with everyone else.

i thought the idea of forced silence for absorption was kind of funny to think about, but mary cappello writes that when she lectures, she actually builds in silence: “When you do this, at first people think that you’re having a breakdown and act alarmed. The silence, which last a few beats, feels to the audience like an hour. What you are after, of course, is a breakthrough—a jolt born of disarming quiet to cut through the static and the noise.” (2020: 12) she doesn’t write about it in the real world, but i think about how i often drive in silence just so i can have a moment to myself. i don’t pull out my phone while i queue in line at the post office or the grocery store. i don’t really think either. i just kinda stand around and watch what everyone else is doing. it’s about looking at the space we’re in, what is going on around us - placing our attention in the framework of where we are (an emplaced, embodied attention, you could say), rather than on our phones. mary cappello calls it “the time of understanding” (2020: 8).

this emplaced and embodied attention cannot be if you’re not actively being (mentally, physically) in your surroundings. if you’re not using the senses you have to experience being alive in the place you are.

Odell talks about the component of attention that requires effort. that the word ‘attention’ itself comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward” (2020:85). never is this more apparent to me than as a parent with a child who talks non-stop. i have yet to find a way to keep my brain from checking out, my eyes from glazing over. i don’t think we were designed for perpetual attention. i think the energy required for an effortful focus of attention requires breaks and rest. the idea that anyone could be ‘on’ for a three hour meeting or an all-day retreat.

jenny odell brings us back to one of the most important parts of paying attention, which is about what we pay attention to. if attention is a limited resource, then how we spend that resource matters. she writes, “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together…attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw” (2020: 72).

and i think we are starting to see some of this collective attention, though still not as widespread as odell might hope. but i see it, on my instagram feed, where people focus on their lives, but also on the things we must look at, the things we must direct our attention to together : on war, on poverty, on the climate crisis. and i think that if we can look together and see together, then we come closer than ever to acting together. and in a society that forever celebrates individual accolades and the ‘self-made’ individual, this togetherness is more important than ever.

i’m still not meditating, but i’m trying to make more space for letting my mind wander. i finish writing this draft and go outside to lay on the deck again. this time it’s really fall. it’s midday and the sun is blazing. a wind keeps the temperature a reasonable septemberish 30 degrees and i listen to a stack of dishes crash in my neighbour’s house through her back screen door. i can feel the boards under my back. i can feel the wetness of a dog nose as it brushes across my cheek. the wood trembles as the dogs clatter about before throwing themselves down too to become baked potatoes. i chew on a hangnail and then block the sun by putting my arms over my face. it’s nice out here.

there is a yell for me because i am the parent of a small child and one of the dogs steps on my hair even though there was a lot of deck around me.

we’ve all been enculturated by capitalism to equate productivity with goodness, but at the end of the day, we’re all working towards the same thing: our eventual demise. and maybe it’s kitschy to say, but people don’t usually say they wished they’d worked more during their lives. there is so much to see by doing nothing.

n xx