In Defense of Doing Nothing
“Given this, perhaps the rare and strange idle time that some of us have found during the pandemic is an opportunity not to “get your life back on track,” as Redditor Polartm put it, but to experiment with nothingness, with a failure of productivity. We might instead use the time to try and find this humanity that Kierkegaard talks of, to tell and listen to stories, to “raise ourselves” in this other, nebulous way. Rather than eradicate this idle time, why not embrace it and expand its boundaries so that others, the workers excluded from this moment of relative stillness, might know it, too?”
A bit of a theme in the things I've been thinking about lately and I will be revisiting Jenny Odell's book soon, but I'm moving into a phase in life where I will be very much no busy. And it's honestly hard, in this culture, to admit that to people because of the judgement that comes. But that's OK, I'm gonna quietly do my thing and see how I go.