I love doing nothing. I’m not supposed to say that. I can’t say that without saying something else first: being able to love doing nothing is a privilege. It is one I’m lucky enough to enjoy, and that is precisely why I’m writing this.
The idea for this piece came to me during my second week of freshman year, when I decided that my slogan for the fall was “say yes to everything.” It was a reasonable instinct. And I tried it, I really did. For the first few weeks it felt good. I felt like the model Yale student: as engaged as I could be. I joined clubs, shopped classes, went to any and every event I could.
I quickly felt overwhelmed, like a piece of gum that has been chewed for too long and lost all of its flavor. I remember staying up late to write an article one night and wondering what it was all for. And then I felt bad for feeling overwhelmed, as though my only value as a student—or person—depended on how much I could do without feeling burnt out.
What I remember most from that fall isn’t the activities. It’s my remarkably messy common room, where I cackled with friends. Ten minutes on Beinecke in between classes. Too much time spent gossiping at Atticus. None of it was on my calendar, and yet it is the only part I can still remember vividly. That is what I mean by doing nothing: passing time with no specific purpose. Yale is a place where, even without trying, every hour is spoken for and the unscheduled kind has to be stolen from the margins of the day.
I love this school and its people dearly. It would be easy to blame Yale, and higher education in general, but that feels cheap. The world I grew up, the world we grew up in, taught me an equation that goes as follows: full schedule = full mind.
It’s the color-coded Google Calendar. It’s the friend who rants about all of the things they’re doing, but it’s okay because they love all seven of them, and these e-boards will look good for law school applications. The complaint and justification of busyness arrive in the same breath. Being overcommitted becomes both a burden and a credential; suffering becomes a performance.
I’m guilty of this too, and I wince a little when I notice it. It feels good to complain, and I love being a sounding board for my friends. I do wonder though, if this pressure to do a million things all the time and talk about it all the time creates an incessant feedback-loop: if everyone performs the act of being busy, then everyone feels obligated to be busy and speak about it. Someone who admits to a free afternoon, outside of their infrequently sanctioned leisure time, looks like they’re falling behind. The silence around rest sustains itself.
Yet most of our busyness is optional. We choose these clubs and commitments; we chose this school, and we are surrounded by people who chose it, too. These commitments fill time, but are not necessary in the sense that they do not earn money—they are, in other words, completely optional. We are, by the standards of most of modern human history, extraordinarily free with our time, yet we spend a great deal of that free time insisting that we have none.
It wasn’t always this way. Our word “school” comes from the Greek word for leisure, scholē. The order ran the other way: we work in order to have leisure. Rest was the purpose; leisure was an end in itself.
We talk about time as a currency. We invest it, spend it, waste it. We’ve made hours into dollars, so that an empty afternoon “earns” nothing.
The usual defense is that rest is productive: we reset and recharge so we can do more. My issue with this argument is that it imposes a set of boundaries on how to do nothing. Taken to its end, the productive defense produces a new anxiety: Am I doing nothing correctly? Am I doing nothing well enough that I’ll be able to do something?
Nothing doesn’t need to be useful. Nothing doesn’t need to be justified by something. The freedom to not justify an empty afternoon is not a natural condition. Nor was it earned by my being unusually relaxed and wise. It is a privilege, inherited the way you would inherit a house without ever seeing the work that went into its walls. I cannot write about the joy of doing nothing without writing about where it came from.
Although my parents enjoy the art of leisure now, when they were my age, they and my grandparents did not have the luxury of doing nothing. For many, an empty afternoon is not a pleasure but a risk. When I lie on my floor and stare at the ceiling, I am doing something that people I love, and the people who came before them, could not afford to do.
I don’t say any of this to spoil the pleasure. I say it because I think it is the reason for this pleasure. Guilt is a bad way of honoring a gift. The only thing to do, then, is to notice it, enjoy it, and want it for everyone.
The test, I think, is small. Can I answer, “what did you do this weekend?” with “nothing” and leave it there, with no apology, no excuse, no joke? I find myself failing this test more often than not.
I’ve sat with this piece for roughly a year. It is not that the ideas I’m presenting are particularly difficult or novel, rather that it has taken me a year, perhaps longer, to work through the guilt I feel for loving doing nothing.
P.S. please find below a list of my favorite nothings:
The long stare out a window, with no thought attached. Lying on the floor of my room in the middle of the afternoon, listening to the hum of my house. A walk with no destination, turning left because the light looks nice that way. A scalding hot shower with music blasting that makes me even later than I normally would be for dinner. Sitting with a friend in comfortable silence and not needing to fill it.
