The Punk of Doing Nothing

I started writing this post weeks ago, over Labor Day weekend, but life prevented me from finishing it “on time” (I thought I could turn something out every two weeks–LOL). This initially frustrated me but turned out to be apropos of the very question I’m trying to think through…

Labor Day weekend marks the transition from summer to fall. Even though classes began for me before the holiday three-day weekend, this is the demarcation from the unregulated, unpredictable openness of summer days to the structure and routine, and even grind, of the academic year. More than New Year’s Day or my birthday, this is my favorite new beginning: the one with brand-new school supplies and back-to-school clothes. It’s hard to let go of summer, but I usually love the idea of summer more than actual summer. I don’t know how to “be” in summer—super productive with all that extra time? Super lazy with all that extra time? Also, where is all that extra time I’m supposed to have? It’s confusing and the three months always feel squandered, like I didn’t do it right. But the fall I know how to do; I have a color-coded calendar. 

Once September hits, that calendar is ablaze with obligations and appointments and tasks, and I admit to taking pride in the way it fills up, a little collage of productivity. Yet I’m increasingly aware of and uncomfortable with my apparent dependence on busyness and doing. I need to be busy. Once I get going it’s hard to stop or differentiate between the importance of tasks–instead, I tell myself “everything must get done, NOW!” When it doesn’t “get done, NOW,” which it usually doesn’t because there is always more to do, I feel defeated. I can’t take satisfaction in what I have done because I tell myself it wasn’t enough. 

So I’m trying to enter this school year with caution, with a mind to not over-extend myself, to protect my time at the end of each day to just hang out with my son and husband. It’s a cliche that we are often too busy for the most important things in life, like watching a toddler build his blocks, but it’s true. When I can be with him, not trying to “take care of this one thing” on my phone, and can linger in that “nothingness” —it is delicious. I wonder what it’s like to be almost two years old, with this limited skill set and this determination to understand and affect my environment. I wonder about what a mind with limited language sounds like inside. And I remind myself of what every parent with grown kids says to me when given the chance—the time goes by so fast—and I can feel like I’m savoring it. 

This was also my fifth Labor Day weekend spent in Ten Sleep, Wyoming. Since I met my husband five years ago I’ve accompanied him to this bity beautiful town at the base of the Big Horn Mountains for the Wyoming Singer-Songwriter Competition & Festival, an event organized by a nonprofit he founded. This year we stayed in an Airbnb on the Nowood River and the property is shared with a local rancher. Our open windows at night brought in the cooling night air and the mews of cows. In the mornings they were just a few yards from the front door, munching, and looking none too happy to see me when I opened the door to take the above picture. It’s an idyllic location and the festival itself has grown to be a kind of large family reunion with (mostly) acoustic guitar music. There are friendships that only exist for me here, yet we pick them up and slide into them again as if a year had not just passed between us. Each afternoon my son naps for 2-3 hours and I have time to do this and read and even nap myself, which I rarely do (actually, I fell asleep while trying to read, but still!). 

These are the kinds of days I pined for when I moved to Wyoming after years of city living: days with lots of space and sky and time to be with people in no particular way. Not rushing, not keeping up, not striving. But it was also naive to think this would suddenly become easier in a less populated (the least populated) place; the internet still exists in Wyoming. And that virtual connectivity is a driver of my “do more” impulse. After at least a decade of trying to hack my life into optimal efficiency, I’m intentionally attempting to (partly) unlearn this attitude.

Maybe the problem with busyness is it takes itself too seriously. It’s not just the fact of doing a lot of things, but the attitude that hitches itself to the doing. An anxiety. I could do all my chores and errands feeling relaxed and letting things take the time they take and even enjoy those mundane but necessary things (I actually do like errands), and my day would probably look the same, but it would not be “busy.” It’s the rushing and urgency and thinking all of this matters that makes busyness toxic. 

In his short essay called “Loitering,” poet Ross Gay interrogates what’s going when we invoke that word:

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”)...All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues. 

He reframes “loitering” (something you’re not supposed to do, especially at a business one has not patronized) as something delightful, joyful, and even transgressive. To loiter is neither to consume nor to produce; so it becomes a radical act. But also, to loiter is to “take one’s time,” so loitering is an act of ownership over time, and I might add attention, which is constantly sought after by various parties, many of whom make money off of where we direct our eyeballs online.

In her book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell argues furiously for resisting the attention economy via “resistance-in-place.” To do this “means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance of productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.”

Gay and Odell challenge the way I previously thought about radical action, which used to mean almost exclusively political activism and protest and public demonstrations of resistance. Not not doing something, which sounds apathetic and lazy if not irresponsible. I grew up thinking it was my moral responsibility to Be the change you want to see in the world and Carpe diem! and all that. I felt obligated to have big goals and ambitions that required external action. 

But how are you supposed to do that at twenty years old other than signal this desire for change and resistance through your identity and how do you signal your identity other than by buying (with your limited income) various (counter) cultural artifacts and clothing while you wait until you’re old enough to do the rebellious thing? But then ten years and twenty years later, you’re still buying stuff to be the kind of person who bucks the system or helps kids in Africa.  

Of course, this is reductive, but it’s also not. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself scrolling through my social media, not looking at humans I know, but lured into one image after the next of impossibly charming and quaint tiny homes in remote locations with pristine kitchens and brilliant little libraries bathed in warm lamp light, thinking, I should really refinish my hardware floors and create a book nook in my living room bay window because then I’d be the kind of person that has a book nook (instead, of course, of just reading the books on my couch, which is also lovely). What I’m trying to get at is the assumption that action and doing and display, often through consuming and public self-curation, is the way we’re supposed to create meaning, create ourselves. That being the type of person who does or likes something is more valuable than the being. Or it’s just easier. I’m aware of this mindset yet I succumb to it all the time, convincing myself that I’m not doing enough, never fully the person I “should” be because I’ve failed to adequately perform myself. 

That said, there is also a real impetus to do. Life is short, and I have no idea exactly how short. Since watching and obsessively rewatching Dead Poets Society as a teenager (RSL <3), I’ve been acutely aware of my limited time on the planet, and that I don’t want to “waste” any of it. In my thirties, I was fanatical about setting routines and habits that would optimize creativity and productivity and prevent squandering. Again, an awareness of life’s brevity is not the problem, but the crushing assumption that doing nothing is a “waste” when it’s actually an essential, enjoyable part of being human. It’s also hard to separate the desire to accomplish from the desire to be the type of person that accomplishes. The pursuit of identity makes us susceptible to a hedonic treadmill of desire and prone to miss the whole point of being alive, which I have to think is really about connection and meaning.

There may also be an unsettling irony here: the more I care about accomplishment the harder it is to do good work. It’s easy to get distracted by the writer I want to be and thus neglect the work of writing. And I do cling to this, perhaps romantic, notion of work for the work’s sake. I want to work quietly, chipping away at my ideas, trying to wrestle them into language, for the possible reward of insight or understanding. But this is always up against a desire for social reward and the expectation that we brand ourselves. As a good kid of the 90s, I utterly hate the idea of “branding” even when done “authentically.” I see branding, capturing and disseminating an image of myself that communicates who I am and what I stand for, undermines the essence of quiet work. I can’t disentangle it from a flavor of “selling out” (an antiquated idea now, I suppose); and yet, I understand that sharing your work with an audience requires this to a certain extent.

Recently I’ve been thinking about quietness in all aspects of life. We can’t quietly have a meal; we take a picture of our food and share it first. We can’t quietly read and contemplate the news; we need to react with a “hot take” on social media. We can’t just try to be better people; we have to announce this project to our peers, that we’re “doing the work,” or some other such slogan. I appreciate the power of social movements, that this is meant as a way of encouraging others, to raise awareness, etc. And there’s a time and place for those strategies. But sometimes I wonder if just doing it would be more meaningful, quietly without public approval. Isn’t there a danger in mistaking the announcing of the action for the action itself? Especially since, when you announce your allegiance to certain causes or ideals, you alienate yourself from others and this drives social division. Instead of “being informed” as The New York Times is always cajoling me to be, I’d prefer to be connected—to humans in my life. Reading the news and getting upset and outraged is easy; reaching out to the older gentleman across the street who might not share my worldview, is hard but real and potentially mind-opening. I wonder if the next great social movement needs to be a quiet, invisible, non-virtual one? Just people making the radical choice, day after day, to attend to their families and friends and communities in simple but direct and genuine ways. 

For the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling impatient to write and produce and feeling badly that it’s been so long since my last post. The Substacks I follow always have a concise publishing schedule and their authors apologize when “content” is delayed. But I am not here to pump out content. And to promise “content” on a schedule seems like an incentive for mediocre work (at least it would be for me). That said, I decided to embark on this Substack project because I need to hold myself accountable to write more. So there’s the paradox: the value and tyranny of a virtual audience. And also: sometimes doing nothing is the radicalism we need.