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".