The Act of Inaction

There have been times in my life where I have felt incredibly burnt out.

Reflecting on these periods, the common theme throughout them was a sort of stasis-as-counterbalance. I am hesitant to use the word rebellion for it. I don't really see laziness as a negative thing, in spite of my appetite for industry. Time spent doing nothing need not necessarily be time wasted.

See, when we endeavor to do things, to accomplish tasks, we are necessarily directing ourselves. Even goals one might mark up as mere maintenance are in service of living a less burdened lifestyle. Unfortunately many powerful forces in our current age are incentivized to direct us to our disservice, draining our attention spans and monetizing our capacity to care.

But certain things are easy to miss when one is in motion and in particular motion guided by a goal. I am not talking about things that will increment some counter one is tracking, just things that happen and exist as matter of factly as the walls of the room I am sitting in while typing this exist.

I guess I'm talking about tracking the subtle flow of how our surroundings and inner workings evolve.

Have you ever taken a moment that you intended to be still and peaceful only to find that your thoughts are still racing, perhaps faster than they were when you were moving? Have you ever in that moment stayed with the stillness until your mind was as clear as water on a windless day? If you have, you might relate to what I'm about to claim, which is that reality becomes ever sharper as we slow down to take in more and process events more deliberately.

There is a bandwidth to the very experience of reality, and I imagine someone who has never stopped to feel the rush of this stream of data at maximum silence and stillness is lacking a sort of reference point, a sort of origin. They're working with a Frenet frame as if absolute space were but a useful fiction, yet there it is in flesh and blood, should you stop for but an hour or two to find it.

There are levels to this beyond recognizing one's own observerness, but I will refrain from describing what they are like, since this is getting new-agey enough as is and I want to talk about another thing now.

After spending many days, weeks, or even months in this state, I come out a different person despite essentially having not moved at all spatially. Often that person is more capable than the person who came into the stasis, and I'm not just talking about resting up and taking breaks, but rather going beyond the point of "okay, I feel better now" and just staying there for a while. The distinction is material because often we say "okay, I feel better now" much sooner than we ought to, and this is yet another symptom of living in a world which measures success through checked boxes and earned certifications.

Humans are bigger than checked boxes and earned certifications, and the work that goes into the leaps that we often point to when we think of the grandeur and splendor of what can be accomplished does not cleanly map back to gradual increments. Some ideas simply cannot spawn without long stretches of time to think, the kind of thinking that has no endpoint, because the endpoint was never the objective, the objective all along was thinking because thinking can be really fun.

And when something is born of joy, that joy tends to infect the very core of the making process and hence the made result. Think about the last thing you've encountered that was genuinely fun to use or interface with -- do you think the person who designed it was miserable while doing it?

I'm writing about this now because in a world where the pressure from benchmarks and gradual increments grows ever larger and louder, we as a society are at risk of losing the thing that allows for great works of art and science to even be brought forth.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone should just sit around all day watching the breeze. I believe that there is great pleasure to be found in riding the momentum of a lead, entering that ever sought after state of flow, where the distinction between work and play blurs with such Gaussian smoothness that it belongs in the dictionary entry for sorites paradox. I also endorse the valor of the inelegant grind, of continuing on even when the environment and like ten other people around you think that you are going nowhere, when you have nothing but your own conviction to blame and too many hours sunk to exit cleanly. I am not anti-work.

Further, I believe that people working together can accomplish things that no one person could accomplish alone, and that the vast majority of pain points fold to this configuration of teamwork. Whether that means nimble teams or colossal megastructures is not what this essay is about. The point is that there are things one ought to figure out on one's own and then there is, well, everything else under the sun.

But a society in which there is always an option to stay in stillness awhile would, I think, be more enjoyable than a society in which everyone is compelled to continue optimizing, well, something.

Socially, I think this would amount to fostering a society in which people who seem to be doing nothing are not looked upon with contempt or disdain, a way of living together where everyone need not be clocking in to experience a sense of belonging.

I guess a powerful rationale for this goal would be, if we were to solve all the vexing problems that humanity faces, what good would it be if everyone were still compelled to their tasks at the end of it, never to step back and marvel at the vast complexity and opulence of what has been created through our shared efforts?

If the next breakthrough idea or artistic opus may only be found while staying completely still, can we as a collective, without betraying what got us to this point, really justify demonizing the act of inaction?