do_nothing.htm

Do Nothing

Quotes

Russell brought a flash of insight. I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive. Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.

The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.

We chose not to take 705 million vacation days in 2017, and more than 200 million of those were lost forever because they couldn’t be carried over to the next year.

Few of our daily activities are focused on helping us become more naturally playful or thoughtful or, god forbid, social. Our social networks are no substitute for the intimate connections we have made for 200,000 years, and our work schedules don’t allow for play.

Part of the problem is that we’re cutting out expressions of our basic humanity because they’re “inefficient”: boredom, long phone conversations, hobbies, neighborhood barbecues, membership in social clubs. We smile indulgently at the naivetés of the past, when people had time for things like pickup basketball and showing slides of Hawaiian vacations to their friends.

“Leisureliness,” says Daniel Dustin of the University of Utah, “refers to a pace of life that is not governed by the clock. It tends to run counter to the notions of economic efficiency, economies of scale, mass production, etc. Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.”

Consider this updated list of human needs, posited by the neuroscientist Nicole Gravagna: Food Water Shelter Sleep Human connection Novelty

Emerson said that “beauty is its own excuse for being,” but that’s not true of labor. Labor needs a reason.

“Belongingness needs do not emerge until food, hunger, safety, and other basic needs are satisfied,” they wrote. “But they take precedence over esteem and self-actualization.”

Similarly, studies of brain activity show that face-to-face interaction is more likely to activate the part of the brain associated with mentalizing, or imagining the thoughts and emotions of another person. Mentalizing is the neural basis for empathy, and it’s an ability that scientists believe is fairly unique to humankind.

The surgeon and author Atul Gawande says, “Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic head injury.” That sounds like a fundamental need to me.

We can end this toxic habit of constant comparison. Stop checking the internet to look at how other people are doing things, for one. If you want to make cupcakes, grab a recipe and make them. Don’t scour Pinterest for the “ultimate cupcake recipe,” buy special tools to decorate them perfectly, and then forget about those tools in a drawer somewhere because you’ve exhausted your interest in actually making the cupcakes.

That should be the new measure in most things: Is it good? Forget how it looks in photographs and ask yourself if you like it.

Don’t look at your friends’ vacation photos and juxtapose them with your own. Instead, ask whether they enjoyed their time off.

If your goal is less stress and more happiness, years of scientific research have proven that rather than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time. In a study that gathered data from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands, researchers concluded that “buying time promotes happiness.” In other words, paying others to mow your lawn, clean your car or house, or do your laundry is a great use of your money, even if it means you can’t afford a bigger TV or an expensive vacation.

There are two kinds of rest: leisure and time off, or spare time. Spare time is not true rest. As Sebastian de Grazia explains in his 1962 book, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, what we call “spare time” is the minutes and hours we find in between the work we do. It’s inextricably tied to work and is meant to recharge our batteries so we can get back to work feeling refreshed.

For the experiment, study participants are assigned missions every day through a specialized mobile app. Those missions direct them to compliment someone on their sweater or talk to a person wearing glasses. Participants were required to talk with no fewer than four strangers over the course of a week.

In this day and age, it’s unlikely that other people will strike up a conversation with you on the elevator or the subway, so take the initiative and say good morning. As the behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has said, few people wave, but almost everyone waves back.

Join a club, go to a book talk at your library or bookstore, sign up for a group hike at a local park. It may sound old-fashioned to become a member of a bowling league or a Rotary club, but those kinds of social networks can quite literally save your life. My son spends every Saturday playing complicated board games with his friends at a local gaming café.

As the psychotherapist and Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello wrote: “Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism.”