It’s a universally acknowledged truth that the best ideas present themselves in the shower. The downtime while showering allows the brain to wander and develop creative solutions to everyday problems. While most of us would consider a shower more akin to a chore on a busy day than a leisurely activity, it might be the closest we get to downtime. In the age of monetizing hobbies and desperately seeking dopamine, time spent doing nothing is not only hard to find but often, hard to justify. In the summer, it can be even harder to find time to relax, as we frantically cram our calendars with festivals, fairs, and any outdoor activity we can think of before the weather turns cold and we’re shunted back inside for seven more months. But reserving parts of your schedule for real rest and relaxation might be more important than we thought.
In Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes leisure as “what we like to do, although it is useless,” noting that we tend to “feel bored and frustrated at our jobs, and guilty when we are at leisure.” Jenny Odell recognizes and refutes the guilt in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Leisure, or as she calls it, doing nothing, “is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.” It is important, then, that we make time, or at the very least, accept time when it presents itself, for doing nothing, for simply being.
We are constantly connected, constantly plugged in. Whether for productivity, distraction, or something else, our hands seem to be glued to our phones, which are in turn affixed to our noses. This makes phones an easy target for explaining our shortening attention spans and increased inability to go more than a few minutes without external stimuli. Most of us constantly crave some kind of input: a video to watch, a stream of pictures to stare at, a slew of opinions from strangers that we can internalize as our own.
Our attention has been reduced to a form of currency; it has become nearly impossible to exist in the world without being bombarded by advertisements. While this was true to some extent even before the digital age, with billboards lining highways and shopping flyers delivered door-to-door on a weekly basis, technology has only exacerbated the problem. Commercials interrupt your favorite show, social media pushes advertisements in between friends and family on your feed, and even the real people you see on social media are often trying to sell something, whether it’s through a brand partnership or their Amazon storefront. It is impossible to be on a phone and not be consuming some sort of marketing. Most of our “free” time – time typically spent on social media – is dominated by ads pushing us to keep shopping, keep spending, keep consuming, faster than our wallets or the planet can handle.
Describing forms of motivation and the differences between them, Csikszentmihalyi says “If everything we do is done in order to get material rewards, we shall exhaust the planet and each other. Admittedly, people will always need possessions based on resources and physical energy. The waste begins when these are not used only to meet necessities but mainly as symbolic rewards to compensate people for the empty drudgery of life.” And so the vicious cycle continues: we scroll, shop, and consume to compensate for the ‘empty drudgery of life’, which exists in large part because we continue to fill our time and minds with more scrolling, shopping, and consumption. Odell references Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, who “found that the ‘trouble’ of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear,” all of which are exacerbated by constant connection. His prescribed antidote for such trouble was simply relaxation and contemplation – two things that are very hard to achieve when our calendars are full and the world is at our fingertips.
Epicurus’s instruction to relax and contemplate is not unlike the instruction to meditate, which comes from the Vedas, the ancient texts from which the practices of yoga and Ayurveda originated. Even this is not so different from a belief in prayer, shared across most religions. Each of these things, to an extent, requires a “centering of attention on a limited stimulus field,” showing that this goal of relaxing the mind, limiting your focus, and taking a minute to not act or do, has been a goal for mankind for centuries. Taking time away from the mundanity of our daily tasks, time specifically carved for doing, for lack of a better word, nothing, might be the most important thing we do all day.
I’m not the first to suggest that unplugging might be a key to reducing anxiety, or that canceling plans can bring about a sudden sense of relief. We are all prone to doing too much, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is guilt: guilt for saying no, guilt for ‘wasting’ time, guilt for letting the summer pass by unseized. But maybe the best way to seize the summer is to use it as a reminder to do less. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “Acts that were previously seen as useless and insignificant should assume an important role in mental health,” so if you needed an excuse to put down the phone, cancel those plans, or just sit on the couch staring into space for a few extra minutes after dinner tonight, here it is. Your brain just might be better for it.
Great read! Thank you!