Do Nothing
In downtime's defence
I’ve been trying to negotiate a new job, spending time with my partner, carving out space for my personal pursuits, staying healthy, as well as handling a flurry of social invitations lately. It’s been challenging.
Not a coincidence I think, then, that I chanced upon these words:
“Work, family, scene. Pick two.”
That’s advice artist Austin Kleon gave Ryan Holiday. Holiday’s reflections on those sage words reminded me of an anecdote investor Ray Dalio shared in his Principles.
Dalio talks about closing down Bridgewater Partners in China despite it doing well as business, because running both Bridgewater and the Chinese venture simultaneously wasn't going to work:
“Despite passing up this great opportunity, I don't regret my choice. I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”
The modern struggle is dealing with abundance, as Naval Ravikant puts it. It’s easy to choose between a good thing and a bad thing. But what if all the alternatives are good? We have so many options to choose from and so many ways in which to manifest parts of our being and our individual selves. Pair an open, creative mind with the hustle mentality of modern culture, and you have a recipe for analysis-paralysis, the constant feeling of being overwhelmed, and exhaustion. Surely, such a situation calls for the kind of wisdom Dalio is advocating.
Reflecting on our current predicament, my partner and I realised and vocalised that we’re not getting enough downtime. By downtime I mean time spent basically doing nothing. This might sound at odds with modern notions of being busy, productive and engaged all the time. The messaging of capitalism and the language of markets has, for better or worse, seeped into nearly every aspect of our lives. The inducements - to hustle, to optimise, to manage, to monetise - reflect only a specific truth: they’re devastatingly effective when we’ve found an opportunity to exploit. But they don’t work for open-ended exploration, for creativity, for discovery, and for problem-solving that may necessitate a significant leap. Allowing space in which to just be may just be the antidote to our predicament.
This fantastic essay by @BasisOfCulture referenced Aristotle’s outlining of two kinds of goods. Goods of first intent: things like love, fulfilment, beauty. Goods of second intent - food, clothing, shelter, money, etc. - are necessary too. But they are merely a means to make acquiring goods of first intent - the truly meaningful stuff - possible. A means to an end.
Over time our jobs and our time are higher and higher percentage work of second intent. We end up doing work we do not love, that we do not find fulfilling, & that stresses us out & is therefore not rad. In this case, the means take us totally off the path to the ends.
Work of second intent is often work that we do to appear productive or useful, but that which we aim for in life - goods of first intent - are neither productive nor useful from a strictly utilitarian point of view. But here’s the thing, productivity & usefulness are vomit-inducingly overrated, especially when focusing on appearing one way takes its toll on our mental well-being. We should take comfort & trust in knowing that nature aims for something much higher than “productivity”. - The Leisurely Manifesto
Cultivate periods of silence and stillness. But don’t make that a chore. Don’t get too busy to twiddle your own thumbs.
Here’s musician Brian Eno, whose words I came across in Manage Your Day-to-Day:
"The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It's the equivalent of dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you're constantly awake work-wise you don't allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself."