In Praise of Doing Nothing

[Kriegsspiel]

I saw a video about dopamine detoxing a while ago, very interesting stuff. I've done it a few times since then and I think it really works as a way to re-baseline yourself. I'm sure the ancients would approve.

It reminded me of what the guy who wrote The Hungry Brain said about what people used to eat before the modern era; they'd eat a pretty monotonous diet that they weren't too excited about. Every once in a while they'd find some food that was really tasty and they'd happily gorge on it, then go back to monotonous eating-to-live.

[Lemur]

@Kriegsspiel

In the past few months, I've deleted all social media accounts and severely limited to browsing the news to one website (Reuters). Slowly but surely...I've seen improvements in my attention span and overall anxiety levels. Still transitioning as I deal with the boredom sometimes described in various Dopamine Detox videos. These are summarized as withdrawal symptoms. Biggest benefit is I can read books now for much longer periods of time instead of stopping at 2/3 pages to go do something else (that something else was usually a higher dopamine activity).

The Hungry Brain - that is by Stephen Guyenet. Excellent book and one of my favorites. That book alone helped me reconcile my dieting strategy and I credit that book to helping me lose 15+ pounds the past few months. Mentioned in my journal. Also in the recommend reading section - I have a topic on it.

[ertyu]

Hadn't encountered your mentions of that book but i'll be reading it...

[Lemur]

@ertyu

viewtopic.php?p=187822#p187822

[ertyu]

thanks

[ertyu]

Resurrecting this thread for all who are/will be working on idleness as one of their skillathon skills. Here are some questions I've been contemplating recently:

1. How do you personally define idleness? When you say you'd like to cultivate idleness as a skill, what does that mean to you?

2. How do you plan to go about cultivating idleness?

3. Can one cultuvate idleness while employed full-time? Part time? While one is self-employed? Or is living on one's investment income (+ diy post-consumer efforts) essential to developing idleness?

See further upthread for recommended reading on the topic

[ertyu]

Relevant post from Ran Prieur w recommended watching and reading on October 30

October 30. Three links about doing nothing. The Joy Of Being A Spiritual Loser is a video about how the modern values of productivity and striving have influenced spiritual practices that are supposed to be about relaxing and letting go.

A blog post, Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom.

And an article about desert island tourism, which sounds like a lot of work and money to get something you could get for free, a quarter mile off the highway in any national forest. People sometimes ask me about Chris McCandless, and while I like the general idea of what he was trying to do, he could have just done it in Montana or something. It was the culture of striving, which he failed to escape, that drove him so deep into Alaska that he couldn't go for help.


On a related subject, I've been thinking about the question: What do Americans boast about? We never boast about being rich, unless it's in the context of boasting about how much poverty we climbed out of. And we don't boast about luck -- if someone says they're lucky, they're being modest, saying their success did not come from being better than other people. I think luck is a real thing that can be cultivated, but when Americans say "I make my own luck," they mean something completely different: that they don't believe in luck so they succeed through hard work.

"Hard work" is the main thing Americans boast about. But who counts as a hard worker? A CEO who does nothing all day but make snap decisions? A fanfic author who puts in a lot of hours for a tiny audience and no money? Surely a full-time janitor is a hard worker. How about someone who spends the same amount of time cleaning stuff, but unobserved and unpaid? What about a chain gang worker, also unpaid, who breaks the biggest rocks? Who's a harder worker, someone who works in a munitions factory, or someone who puts in the same hours building bombs in their garage?

People will answer these questions differently. But I think the general consensus is that "hard work" is a social activity, a performance of obedience to the dominant system.

Another thing Americans boast about is self-discipline, by which they mean internalizing the dominator. "When I was a kid, parents and teachers forced me to do stuff I didn't feel like doing. Now that I'm grown up, I force myself to do stuff I don't feel like doing." I mean, this is a necessary skill to not end up a homeless addict. But I don't think it's something to be proud of, I think it's a tragedy. There are eight million species in the world and only one has this problem, and only recently.

Go to the blog for the links, im too lazy to copy paste and format

"Internalizing the dominator" - figuring out the ways we've done so is crucial to de-jobbing.

Do you agree that self-discipline and internalizing the dominator are equivalent? I agree they're equivalent as conceived of by society at large.

[C40]

I'm currently taking two months of bicycling and otherwise doing almost 'nothing'. That means sometimes riding for a large portion of the day. And going for coffee. Reading. Playing old videogames. A short nap most days. And some bits of life organization. I almost think you can't really 'do nothing' but some people I know get a lot closer to me. It's subjective. In my current situation, if I'm enjoying the bicycling and especially if my fitness is improving, I feel like I'm accomplishing something. When I have some feeling of progress, I feel like that area of my life, and perhaps enough of it overall, is good/ok.

I'm one month in and one thing I've noticed is that this routine does make me more likely to sometimes do literally nothing for brief periods of time. I mean just sitting and relaxing for a while, not thinking about much/anything, maybe looking around. I'd gotten out of doing that and even though I wasn't busy lately, I'd nearly always be doing something, watching something, or thinking something.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, since I recently had the experience of being locked-in for Covid while unemployed in the company of an ESTJ engineer and then in the company of an XNTJ multi-millionaire, it's pretty clear to me that Te is "the Dominator." Charts that break down average income by MBTI type also make this clear. This is also why women who are married to executive types often seek divorce when their husbands retire and/or find some sort of activity outside of the home. However, the self-aware submissive (Ti/Fe) and/or cheerful-bandit-tendency-type (in possession of Ne energy/initiative)female may observe the practice of "ONLY follow/hear literal instruction" and thereby provide herself with wide open spaces of free time in which to engage in idle reading and/or random species identification walks. IOW, if you actually care (Fe)about "What would make a human with dominant Te happy?" you will basically turn yourself into some kind of abject slave, but if you notice that they are usually too busy to pay very much attention to what you are doing, then you can pretty easily free camp on their scaffolding.

Anyways, since my own internal Te is in 6th position, it does not tend to bother me very much when I am left to my own devices, until the the external forces that would render me a homeless addict do come to bear and cause me to abandon my idle reading and other random explorations (some of which may be lucrative)in favor of hard and/or (more likely) dull/routine work.

[jacob]

I've noticed that different kinds of "doing" counts differently both in my own valuation but also in other's.

There's

• objective doing --- "I built a table. I grew two hundred pounds of potatoes. ..."
• interobjective doing --- "I worked as a engineer. I published a book. I ran a blog. ..."
• intersubjective doing --- "I joined a club. I was part of a ..."
• subjective doing --- "I read 100 books. I meditated daily. ..."

In the greater society, only interobjective "doing" counts. It is the only kind you can put on a resume. For example, if you're learning something new, it only "counts" if you got a diploma. If you just taught yourself, it doesn't count the same way. Of all the ones, subjective doing counts the least.

As I've gotten older, it seems like I've switched from mostly interobjective doing to subjective doing. Subjective doing doesn't "have anything to show for it" but it's still a kind of doing. The question is whether it "made a difference that makes a difference". For example, did one become a different person from all that meditation?

[J_]

..."
. For example, did one become a different person from all that meditation?

For me the study of philosophy as amateur and the internalisation of it made me a different reacting person. As always it intermingles with getting older/ getting more “life lessons” under ones belt.

[Henry]

Maybe because of my line of work, doing nothing is an option to be considered when strategizing. In terms of personal activity, no one is ever doing nothing, they are just doing something else.

[grundomatic]

When considering what to do with my time off, I pretty much also arrived at the conclusion that there is no "doing nothing". Even staring at a wall could be considered training your mind, watching TV is being passively entertained, etc. I also scrapped "doing nothing productive" in favor of "just doing whatever I feel like"--more freeing. As 7w5 once correctly guessed, part of me (tertiary Te?) can be a real asshole boss, setting way higher standards and expectations for myself that I wouldn't dream of expecting from others. I needed to keep that guy in check if I was going to recover from burnout, which in a way came from too much "doing" of the non-preferred kinds. Thanks @jacob for another useful model.

This is not what you asked for, @ertyu, I'm sorry. I guess in the "spirit of idleness", I won't be participating in the skillathon, because it conflicts with my plans of just doing what I want.