Why We Should All Do Nothing More
Doing nothing and succumbing to daydreams is good for creativity and mental health
In 2010, Simon Amstell recorded his debut stand-up special, Do Nothing. Towards the end of the special, he discusses a bill he received which he couldn’t get out of and had made him angry, describing it as a ‘real injustice’. On a taxi ride, the driver says to him that if there’s nothing you can do about something, then you do nothing. The past, the stories we tell ourselves about the past, and even about who we were and are, are just that: stories. They’re made up, Amstell says, and if there’s nothing to be done about something, if the story can’t be changed, then you do nothing — you accept instead.
A very different comic talks about a very different kind of doing nothing in his 2011 Out Out Tour. Mickey Flanagan recounts how he sometimes lies on the sofa in a slightly darkened room and stares at the ceiling. Sometimes, he isn’t even thinking: ‘just being’. (He makes a really good joke here: he says ‘I might become unbearably light,’ which is a reference to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a 1984 novel about the Prague Spring.) Flanagan goes on to talk about different occasions when the act of doing fuck all can be achieved: watching the kettle boil, waiting for the toast to pop, watching the bath run.
Two different but equally valid takes on doing nothing. Being angry about something you can’t control is self-evidently a waste of time. It’s that old concept of simply letting go, easier said, naturally, than done. Why stay angry at something you can’t control? If it’s out your hands, even though your anger may be warranted, there’s no use in being angry any more. That’s what Amstell’s talking about, but Flanagan’s idea interests me more.
I’m a slave to my conscience, like Bertrand Russell said, which was the reason he was so prolific: he felt he should always be achieving something, producing something. I’m acutely aware of that feeling, which is why I’ve got about six different projects on the go at any one time, none of which are ever given my full attention and which therefore never achieve the potential they (maybe) could. But why should we always be doing something, making something? Our time, after all, should be ours to spend as we please, like our money (for the most part) is. And most people are bad at doing nothing: some experiments show that subjects would rather administer electric shocks to themselves than be left alone with their thoughts for a mere fifteen minutes.
And yet, the positives of doing proper, old-school fuck all are worth the guilty feeling which anyway will eventually be dispelled by making a habit out of doing fuck all. In Flanagan’s version, he spends his fuck-all time considering his life choices, specifically his commitment to his wife. It’s a joke, of course, but considering whether our lives are how they want them to be isn’t a waste of time — self reflection is good. What’s more, doing nothing is good for creativity. Einstein supposedly formulated his theory of general relativity while daydreaming; Archimedes apparently came up with the practice of using water displacement to measure volume while relaxing in a bath; and Robert Goddard daydreamed about flying to Mars and ended up becoming the father of modern day space flight. There have been plenty of studies on how relaxing and letting your mind wander is good for creativity, improves your mood, even helps you run your business.
But forget all that. If you’re thinking that you might come up with the next revolutionary invention while you daydream, you aren’t properly doing fuck all. The whole idea of doing nothing is just to sit, to take a load off, maybe to close your eyes and, most important, to not worry about what it is you think you should be doing. (My favourite time to do nothing is during twilight. When an early summer evening sets in, a surreal greyness washes over the bedroom, and I sit in my chair and do nothing. Only three things are allowed when I’m doing fuck all: drinking, smoking, and thinking, and even the latter is discouraged, if I can possibly help it.)
But how to do nothing? First, just take a couple of minutes to do nothing, or even a minute. Do it how Flanagan says, by watching the kettle boil (it does boil, despite what your grandma might have told you), or while your food is cooking. Then up your time until you can sit and do nothing for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. Make it a habit, if you can. Find a nice spot to sit at, on a bench somewhere with a view, or a secluded place you can be alone, or somewhere on the street where you can peoplewatch. Be alone with yourself, with your thoughts, and just do nothing.
Of course, doing nothing is a privilege. Leisure — which is different to relaxation — is something only enjoyed by those who have the means to enjoy it. As a middle-class, unmarried, childless man, I have the luxury of time, the luxury of lonesomeness, and the luxury of freedom. Not everyone has these advantages, and finding twenty minutes or five minutes or even one minute to yourself might be difficult for some people who are too busy worrying about where the next meal’s coming from to waste their time doing nothing. That guilty feeling of needing to produce, of needing to do something, isn’t only drilled into our psyches by a culture that tells us time is money and our jobs define our identities; it’s also there because so many people are hard-up. The ‘grind’, as my friends across the pond so affectionately call it, also only exists because so many people don’t have enough to survive on.
That nota bene notwithstanding, have a think about how to spend the next ten minutes you find free in your schedule. Rather than succumb to the guilty feeling of production, maybe stand outside with a cup of something warm, look up at the clear sky, and contemplate your own insignificance as Louis MacNeice did:
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
