The Art of Doing Nothing

I loafe and invite my soul,

- Whitman

When I was a little kid I had took take this hour long bus ride to school, and since this was the days before iPhone I would look out the window and just space out mostly. As far as I remember that’s pretty much what we all did. And it sounds boring I know, but it wasn’t! What I found was that I had a magic internal movie screen filled with all kinds of wondrous and fantastical stories and ideas that I could direct. I think during the couple of years where I had that long commute, I was actually training some very real muscle of the imagination doing basically like the equivalent of running a marathon every week, for the imagination muscle. That creativity is something that still serves me to this day, I’ve always had an incredibly rich and powerful imagination, it’s what led me to write my strange book about creativity called DIY Magic.

What I am circling is the lost art of being bored. The skillset of twiddling your thumbs, of loafing, of standing around with nothing much to do. of idling.

Maybe we aren’t addicted to our phones so much as we have lost touch with the art of doing nothing. We have lost the ability to be comfortable being slightly bored. Of sitting through the slight, temporary discomfort of doing nothing much at all. Meditators know what I am talking about and so do ex-smokers. If you have quit smoking, you really know what it is like to be totally addicted, unable to get through the day without lighting up a cigarette. When you quit, sure it’s tough for a while. But there comes a day when you pass by somebody sucking in clouds of nicotine and you realize you haven’t thought smoking in days, weeks even, the idea of smoking has lost all its appeal, and the idea of lighting a cigarette on fire and putting it in your mouth sounds strange and even a bit repulsive. If you know you know.

How Much of Doing Nothing do we Need?

There is a specific number of minutes that the experts agree you should spend doing cardio exercise and it’s I think 150 minutes, or basically 2 and half hours a week. They say that everyone should be getting light exercise at about that amount. Most of us probably are not! I know i am getting way less than that. But at least the experts agree on this magic number. And they seem to say look it doesn’t even really matter much how you get that 2-3 hour of exercise. It can be a little bit each day or just a couple times a week, and hour here and hour there. As long as it amounts to about 2 and half hours. Also, it doesn’t matter how you get the cardio whether it’s jogging, tennis, cycling, swimming dancing, roller-skating whatever. You can do a mix of it all. We have this really clear—here is a good number of minutes to exercise for. We should have that for — we need that for being offline, and for just doing your own thing too. For starters why not make it (at least) the same amount—at least 150 minutes of just being, offline, and in the world.

We know what we get when we exercise a decent amount—the benefits run from feeling better and looking better to living longer and feeling happier. I suspect that carving out enough downtime to chill, do nothing, be idle, putter around, be offline and so on would have equally wide-ranging benefits.

From making you more relaxed and happier to more creative and also probably make people better at living life, better at connecting, more embodied, more present. And I am not saying—hey we all need to be meditating and chanting for 3 hours a week. But I think doing anything as long as it is just chilling and not trying to achieve anything counts—hanging out with friends, cooking, probably gardening and taking long walks and just goofing off. All these sorts of things.

So, consider setting aside some specific time each week, where you are offline, off your phone and off screens and also not busy doing something else. If the idea sounds scary then you are who this idea is for.