It's Time for Absolutely Nothing!

No matter how I schedule my time, it seems like there's always "something" that needs to be done.

Even when I try to block off time to get my work done within a specific time frame, there is still other stuff that needs to be done beside that. You know, like needing to go to town and do the grocery shopping, and I need to take packages to the post office, and pick up prescriptions from the local pharmacy.

And if not that, then there's a lawn that needs to be mowed and I need to clean the gutters and there's a repair outside that needs to be done to one of our deck chairs.

There was a time in the history of human development where we were told that automation was supposed to "make our lives easier" and somewhere along the way we were going to have more leisure time to do the things we actually wanted to do. Fact remains that even under those circumstances we were still talking about "doing things."

As visitors to these pages (thank you!) probably remember I am fond of talking about the fact that I like to think of myself as a human being rather than a human doing or a human having. Those aren't just words I use to give lip service to them it is a sincere goal in my life to be a human being. But it is also extremely difficult.

So-called "grind culture" notwithstanding, we seem to have created lives where every single moment we are awake and breathing there is something that has to happen.

The Fine Art of Doing Absolutely Nothing seems to be going the way of other mostly obsolete concepts such as cursive handwriting. Even when we say that we're "going to take the day off" it's never really a day off because we're going to use that day off to do all those things that we couldn't do before because we were balls to the wall dealing with the other things that we had to do.

Much of the time, if you ask somebody what they did on their day off and they respond with the phrase "absolutely nothing" they're basically lying because every moment from when they got up to when they got to bed was filled with "something" they needed to do even if those things were leisure activities or not-work-related activities.

In my world doing nothing means exactly that... you're doing absolutely nothing — you're simply sitting there without any plans or anything that has to happen and you just are looking at what's going on around you... maybe watching the birds in the trees in your yard or watching people go by in the traffic below your apartment, or something else that essentially does not require you to engage with anything.

Of course a great many people avoid doing nothing because they are massively uncomfortable just being alone with their thoughts without having some kind of purpose.

I think we've lost our way somewhere along the way because we are no longer comfortable with any moment in our existence that doesn't serve a purpose. If you look back across human history it actually wasn't until the invention of the steam engine and the associated time clock that went with it that our days stopped being largely our own.

In a way, the very device that was supposed to make our lives better and easier ended up stealing something from us and that was having any time that was truly our own, along with the simple act of loafing without a specific purpose.

I periodically still manage to do nothing for short bursts of 5 to maybe 15 minutes but it has become a rarity, even for me as somebody who works for myself from home.

The last time I can actually remember pretty much doing nothing for an extended period was probably about 30 years ago when I spent 3 weeks at my auntie's summer house in Denmark by myself and I pretty much had no agendas and nothing that needed to be done and my entire day revolved around nothing more than Maybe mowing the lawn once a week and going to the local stores once a week. Otherwise I was by myself and saw nobody and had very little engagement with the outside world because this was before the house was actually wired for Internet.

To some people that might sound like a nightmare, but as I look back on it it was pretty much the last time I can remember being wholly and fully myself. That's a pretty sad reflection on existence, isn't it?

Doing nothing seems to have become a luxury, and I frankly don't think that is healthy... nor is it healthy that we are often made to feel bad about "loafing."

Thanks for stopping bye, and have a great Friday!

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2026.08.07 01:27 PDT
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