In Praise of Doing Nothing

Simple living, extreme early retirement, becoming and being wealthy, wisdom, praxis, personal growth,...
User avatar
unemployable
Posts: 1007
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 11:36 am
Location: Homeless

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by unemployable »

Campitor wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 5:07 pm
Idleness gained via effort, reflection, and intention is praiseworthy. You can rest knowing you are aspiring to resiliency, self sufficiency, and self discovery and contemplation.

Idleness gained by sloth induced dependency is worthy of no praise. Not an accusation against anyone on this forum - just adding context. ;)
What if it's because I wrecked my car and haven't felt like going out and getting a new one?

OK, more seriously, what if gaining the ability to do nothing was the goal all along that I spent years toiling to work towards? Do I have to come with a new idea? And what gives you the privilege of keeping score for me anyways?

BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by BookLoverL »

I don't think that the do nothing lifestyle requires literally doing nothing. The idea is more to listen to what you yourself want to do in the moment, without worrying about whether it will gain you a skill or earn money or whatever - you are just doing it for the joy it creates right then.

I think the idea of living without ambition is interesting. As long as there is the need to earn more to cover the desired lifestyle, ambition will always creep in. When you live without ambition, you don't paint with the hope of becoming a famous artist, for instance, but just because you were in the painting mood. If you become famous, it's incidental. And there is no need to put any work into marketing yourself.

The idea that it might be internal factors that block me from living the Do Nothing lifestyle is interesting. I think there is likely a mix of internal mindset factors, and external circumstances. Right now, I am putting in more effort than I prefer to earn money (I would prefer none effort) and until I reach FI or find a way of earning that's more playful for me, this will continue to be the case, so partially the external factor of capitalist society is keeping me from living the do nothing lifestyle. But it *is* also partially internal, because I have some troubles with procrastinating, leading to not doing work tasks until the last minute and causing the leisure time I try to have to feel stained by guilt from that. I don't think I'm likely to stop procrastinating, because I've always had issues with that, but if I could try to live in the moment more with my time, that would be nice.

AxelHeyst
Posts: 2118
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2020 4:55 pm
Contact:

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by AxelHeyst »

I think procrastination only exists in relationship to "should/have to", as in, "I should study for that test, I have to prepare this presentation for work", etc.

I don't think it's possible to procrastinate if you only do whatever you want, including nothing. You just decide or discover that you'd rather do Nothing rather than some Something you thought you wanted to do, but were mistaken.

Filling your time with scrolling through social media and random internet browsing isn't Doing Nothing, in my view. It's Faffing Off. It's distracting our minds from either a) stuff we should be doing, hence, it's procrastination, or b) Doing Actual Nothing, which is terrifying to a mind conditioned over decades to always be in some relationship with Should's and Have To's.

When we were children, we were able to Do Nothing easily because we had no relationship with Should's and Have To's. Doing Nothing now, after having the hammer down for so long, is Hard Work. Or rather, it's painful work, because we've been distracting ourselves from the quiet desperation of our meaningless lives with all these Important Things we Should/Have To do, and when we finally figure out how to remove those things from our lives, we're faced with the yawning void of all the internal work we haven't been doing for years, all the failures we've swept under the rug, all the beauty in the world we've been Too Busy to notice (and we mourn those lost moments of appreciation!!), and (perhaps) the sorry state of affairs our personal relationships are in.

Doing Nothing sounds like a Spa Day to those whose stressful lives are filled with Have To's and Should's, but for those who abruptly go from 100mph to a dead stop with no ramp-down, no warning, it's more like detoxing. It's like sweating out a hangover. It's like puking out food poisoning. It's that scene in Chantaraam where he locks himself in a room to get off heroin. It's the only way to get better, but it's bitter and it sucks and if there's an easy way out, it's tempting. (I suspect this explains the phenomona of FI people going back to work.)

Well that's my view of it anyways, as someone in the middle of FT work detox for the first time.
Last edited by AxelHeyst on Thu Sep 10, 2020 7:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

horsewoman
Posts: 659
Joined: Fri Jun 07, 2019 4:11 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by horsewoman »

@AH I belive that is true! Seen from the other side (as someone who never seriously got on the FT work path) I don't really grok all the stressing out about "what to do after quitting FT work" that is such a common theme here on the forum. It feels foreign to me, for there are always more interesting things to do than there are hours in the day - plus I like to sleep as much as I possibly can.

So comparing it to a detox seems about right to me. Just to be clear, it was not all roses on this side of the fence either. My difficulty was not feel like a lazy bum/failure while all my contempraries got on the career track. These feelings did crop up, but never for long, because the next interesting thing came along claiming my attention.

In the end one has to be mindful. "Doing nothing" easily slides into unhealthy behaviours in this day and age where constant mindless entertainment is offered, and plenty of substances are available for little money to get high/numb.
I like Tom Hodgkinsons definition of being an "idler". To be idle unapologetically when the fancy strikes but to be doing (interesting) things most of the time.

BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by BookLoverL »

Yes, definitely if someone is not used to how to handle free time, things can devolve into meaningless faffing. They often do when procrastinating, too.

I do have enough of an idea personally at least about various interesting things that I would like to do in a situation without pressure, not just bumming around on social media or whatever. There's definitely a difference in feeling between doing something considered "useless" in a way that's genuinely satisfying and makes you happy, and doing it in the way that leaves you feeling emptier in the end. I've done both.

I think the lifestyle I'm thinking of in the event I lose the financial pressure is more like: there are plenty of interesting things I would like to actively do. However, I would like to select these things based on personal interest and whimsy and feel free to drop them whenever I get bored, rather than basing things on "will this hobby also simultaneously build my career/bring money in" or feeling vaguely guilty that I haven't done that.

AxelHeyst
Posts: 2118
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2020 4:55 pm
Contact:

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by AxelHeyst »

Definitely, that sounds lovely and I think it's where I'm trying to get to as well. I think Derek Sivers is a nice role model for this way of living, based on the vibe I get from his random communiques on the internet.

He once wrote (or said in a podcast probably) that he has "an infinite attention span", meaning, if he's stoked on something, he'll do it for 16 hours a day for weeks and *love* his life. And then stop when he's done/over it. And if he's playing with his son, when his son was little, he could just drop in and inhabit the space of being a six year old basically all day. He and his kid would be doing their thing long after all the other adults dropped out to check their email or whatever.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by ertyu »

my brain reading this: "yeah, we should strive to overcome our conditioning to always be in some relationship to "shoulds" and "have-tos"


good work, brain
good work :lol:

Campitor
Posts: 1227
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:49 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by Campitor »

unemployable wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 7:14 pm
What if it's because I wrecked my car and haven't felt like going out and getting a new one?

OK, more seriously, what if gaining the ability to do nothing was the goal all along that I spent years toiling to work towards? Do I have to come with a new idea? And what gives you the privilege of keeping score for me anyways?
I've never claimed any privilege on keeping score on how you live your life. No one has the right to do that other than yourself but this will not keep those who know you from keeping their own scores in regards to how you choose to live. It's part of life. How you suffer those slings and arrows, should they come your way, is totally up to you.

There's two things I try to recall daily:

1) Remember Death - a stoic saying
2) "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”― Seneca

What gives life meaning can only be determined by you. Once you find out what that meaning is, you should strive towards it with determination and not halfheartedly so you don't wind up regretting life on your deathbed. Death is unavoidable. We owe it to ourselves to look in the mirror and determine how we can live a full life without doing anyone else harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevit ... e_(Seneca)

classical_Liberal
Posts: 2283
Joined: Sun Mar 20, 2016 6:05 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by classical_Liberal »

unemployable wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 7:14 pm
And what gives you the privilege of keeping score for me anyways?
I think this is where definition is important. What does one mean by "doing nothing". Because doing what you want is doing something. I do think there are some universals to human nature though. While sitting in front of the TV or computer in passive leisure may feel great after a hard week or months work on day one, it probably won't feel nearly as good on day 60. Eventually, the decay of body and mind makes it a worse and worse experience.

If we define doing nothing as, not participating in productive activities, then the problem shifts to what is productive. In your life/opinion, in your social circle, and in society generally.

So, I think when I stated that the problems are mostly internal, what I meant was that we allow other people to determine what is productive or what we should be doing. As @unemployable stated, letting someone else keep score.

Obviously most people here believe in some form of self agency to this problem. I would also argue another, often ignored, form of agency here is purposely picking a social group. Rare is the human that is totally uninfluenced by peers or society at large. Picking a group that won't keep score for us, or one that score they way we prefer, goes a long way towards helping us shift our definition of productivity.

It's also important to continually ask ourselves why we feel the need to be productive in the realms we are pursuing. Many times it's all societal BS, sometimes it's a more universal truth for all humans, sometimes it's individual priorities. If we can stay focused on the latter two forms of productivity, to me, that's doing what I need to and doing what I want. Whereas mostly, people think that the only productivity that counts is the first, hence when we don't participate in it we are "doing nothing".

daylen
Posts: 2528
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2015 4:17 am
Location: Lawrence, KS

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by daylen »

This is one of those topics where the (personality x maturity) space more or less covers the territory (i.e. what is doing nothing?). Far too lazy to draw it out but here is one corner of the square: at kegan4 what is considered doing nothing is the back of the stack (i.e. functions 5-8) because these have been either handled by others or otherwise been executed unconsciously by the agent up to this point. Other possible corners are buried somewhere in my journal.

There are other ways to cover the territory and this is just one example with up to 2*16+8+2= 42 degrees of freedom(*). Another possibility is to invert and treat exploration of new functions as doing something as opposed to nothing.

(*)..kegan1 and kegan5 each hold a single perspective for all types... 8 types at kegan2
Last edited by daylen on Fri Sep 11, 2020 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

suomalainen
Posts: 979
Joined: Sat Oct 18, 2014 12:49 pm

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by suomalainen »

@axel gets it. You can also think of those as "roles".

I do a lot of nothing these days. I work from home, and I moved out of my marital home, so I have a lot (A LOT) of alone time for a middle-aged guy with a job and kids. But I spend much of it just sitting in the quiet in my condo. Sometimes I distract myself with reading stupid shit on the internet (ahem), or watching youtube, or even some netflix again recently. But all throughout the day, when "working" or on weekends without the kids, I just sit and stare out the window. A largely slower pace of life really suits me, and it recharges me to be able to handle those days or weeks or even months when work really ramps up.

I used to fantasize about a life doing nothing, but, as it turns out, you don't need to do nothing for 16-18 hours a day. You just need some of it.

What I have found that is something I desperately need every day or nearly every day is one to two hours in the woods, riding my bike or walking, but preferably something that brings me almost to the point of exhaustion. I find those two hours to give my life "meaning" and "purpose", and I am actually quite disturbed that I (literally, physically) can't do those things more than a few hours a day. This past weekend, I did a hard ride on Friday, a hard hike on Saturday, and a long SUP on Sunday, and I was wrecked for 3 days afterwards. I still got out for short recovery rides and walks, but ... my body just can't handle as much as my "soul" longs for. So, I'm trying to accept my body's limitations and enjoy the time I have in the woods, the time that feeds my soul, and then to find something else to do in my remaining time.

When I have the kids, tho, there's no rest for the weary.

User avatar
unemployable
Posts: 1007
Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 11:36 am
Location: Homeless

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by unemployable »

@Campitor, I am aware of the Seneca quote. While I was not aware of it when I quit my last real job 10 years ago, to move to the Colorado mountains and spend a summer hiking them while I still had fitness and time, I proffer that I had come to the same conclusion. As opposed to letting my life pass away in a nondescript office building and on airplanes doing 6am ORD-LGA runs.

The issue is more of finding something agreeable that is the intersection of challenging, rewarding, likely to succeed and fitting my competitive edge. Until then, I'll keep staring out the window at the mountains. We got snow a couple days ago, it's pretty up there.

BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by BookLoverL »

I was thinking and maybe the difference is between "doing nothing at all ever" and "doing nothing of consequence". Doing nothing at all, literally, is indeed likely to bring on depression. But doing nothing of consequence, except by your own measure, can be quite freeing, because it means you can ignore all the people trying to tell you what behaviour counts as productive.

Campitor
Posts: 1227
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:49 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by Campitor »

unemployable wrote:
Thu Sep 10, 2020 9:30 pm
The issue is more of finding something agreeable that is the intersection of challenging, rewarding, likely to succeed and fitting my competitive edge. Until then, I'll keep staring out the window at the mountains. We got snow a couple days ago, it's pretty up there.
The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life. ~ Katsumoto - The Last Samurai

Although this quote is from a movie, it resonates. If you watched the movie, you know that Katsumoto as he's dying, looks up at a cluster of cherry blossoms and declares all are perfect. The entire movie was about not living in the past, or worrying about the future, but living in the present and being mindful. Because Katsumoto was focused on the "perfect" cherry blossom, he was unable to see the perfection in all cherry blossoms until he was dying.

Only through impending death do we examine what matters and what does not. If staring at a landscape covered in snow brings you joy and peace, it's not wasteful and perhaps the near perfection of praiseworthy idleness.

But how do you know what form of "idleness" will bring no regrets? It's hard to say for sure. But if you run through the mental exercise of imagining you'll be dead in a year, it will help prune the unimportant and steer you towards choices you will not regret later in life. And neither of our preferences is the better choice because that's determined by our own personal values. What's important to you will differ from what's important to me.

And these values will change since we're not set in stone; it's important to periodically re-examine ourselves. And there's no right or wrong way to live as long as you're not harming someone else or being destructive. Once you've made your choices by "remembering death", you then have to live mindfully so you don't miss the perfection right in front of you.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by ertyu »

Campitor wrote:
Fri Sep 11, 2020 8:08 am

But how do you know what form of "idleness" will bring no regrets?
Isn't this a form of searching for the "perfect" idleness? Seems to me it would be much better to resolve to appreciate and cherish the idleness you've got ;)

BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by BookLoverL »

I don't think a life with no regrets at all is possible, but in general, I'm not defining my success at life by if I've reached some arbitrary goal. There are two things I think I want out of life:

1) Is whatever I am doing enjoyable and satisfying in its own right?

2) Is whatever I am doing either improving the general state of the world for other people to live in, or if not then neutral in terms of the general state of the world?

So, basically, I see the purpose of life as being to enjoy yourself while not messing things up for everyone else. I don't need the perfect form of idleness for this.

In fact, the societal narratives which encourage all of us to Work Harder and Produce More often end up causing a lot of damage to the world via environmental destruction, and to people via time taken away from families and communities. So in fact it's actually more moral to live a life of relative idleness.

Campitor
Posts: 1227
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:49 am

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by Campitor »

ertyu wrote:
Fri Sep 11, 2020 9:17 am
Isn't this a form of searching for the "perfect" idleness? Seems to me it would be much better to resolve to appreciate and cherish the idleness you've got ;)
What we're currently experiencing is a result of infinite variables that have combined to generate life at the present moment. This moment is neither perfect or imperfect. It's our own subjectivity that defines the moment. Our consciousness is the instrument we use to experience life. Examining ourselves to see if we're living the life fully is akin to mastering a violin and keeping it well tuned. It's through this mastery that we can experience the perfection within the imperfect which can help guide us toward our reason for being; to help find our Ikigai.

https://savvytokyo.com/ikigai-japanese- ... pose-life/

User avatar
Lemur
Posts: 1612
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2016 1:40 am
Location: USA

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by Lemur »

Is this how most of the current generation feels?

https://youtu.be/-QvEZoPy96g

Dopamine Detox...

Can sort of relate to the above video. Have since gotten better. But our society sometimes breeds never being able to have an off button.
Last edited by Lemur on Wed Oct 14, 2020 6:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BookLoverL
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:17 pm
Location: England

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by BookLoverL »

I think your link might be broken, Lemur - I clicked on it to watch it and it gave me a 404 not found.

User avatar
Lemur
Posts: 1612
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2016 1:40 am
Location: USA

Re: In Praise of Doing Nothing

Post by Lemur »

@BookLoverL

Fixed.

Post Reply