The Case For Idleness
Don't Be Too Productive
It’s hard work doing nothing. Where there was once downtime there’s now screen time. We’re endlessly reachable, our phones notifying us about something that seems important but isn’t. I’m guilty too. I used to read the print newspaper everyday—now I refer to the app constantly, yet absorb nothing but a creeping sense of dread. I spend too much time on eBay, listening to beloved podcasts, constructing fake distractions (I don’t need to study the interior of another English country house).
I waste time but not in the right way. And there is a right way of doing nothing. We need to create the space where we’re disconnected from the perception of the ongoing hum. The scroll defines our time—it’s addictive, it rarely improves and it never ends. Why does the chyron exist? To make you think something is unfolding, news is developing. Most of the time: it’s not. But we keep watching.
We’re left without time to think on our own, to reflect, to consider the prospect of boredom. And being confronted with boredom forces us to amuse ourselves in some other way—to find pleasure in the natural world, to appreciate where we are, to arrange our thoughts at leisure. When we’re scrolling we do none of these things. We scroll for stimulation, for excitement, for anger, to be incited. The mind loses its fitness when it is offshores self-sufficiency to an algorithm.
Schedule your free time if you have to, and if you don’t have free time then create it. Nobody’s going to do it for you. Read a book that’s not about management strategy or how to accomplish more by noon. Choose a novel by a dead person about whether one sister marries the bishop or the too handsome gentleman. An Englishman once told me he learned everything he needed to know about human nature by reading the work of Anthony Trollope. I don’t know about that, but I like the commitment (post-Trollope he devoted himself to history).
We all need to create a private world for ourselves. But instead we scan picturesque vacations that make us think we want to be somewhere we aren’t. Having illusions about other people’s lives accomplishes nothing and keeps you from focusing on what matters to you.
This is where I could tell you that fishing is that thing for me, where I connect to a place and an activity and to myself. That’s all true, but probably not for you. So forget fishing. But when I see somebody who gets real pleasure from cooking, kayaking, painting, gardening—then I know that person has a direct line to their own happiness. These are skills you can learn and improve, they can be done with others or alone. Crucially, they have nothing to do with your phone. They’re not technically productive.
But what’s so good about productivity? Somebody who wants you to be productive probably employs you and that’s the last person you should trust with your happiness. Now we can't even let kids enjoy their summer—they’re at camp learning how to speak Mandarin. What would Royal Tenenbaum say? Get out there and chop it up. Go play outside, do something that isn’t supposed to get you into Yale.