Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. —BERTRAND RUSSELL, “In Praise of Idleness,” 1932

I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits.

I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive. Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.

What is the cult of efficiency? It’s a group whose members believe fervently in the virtue of constant activity, in finding the most efficient way to accomplish just about anything and everything. They are busy all the time and they take it on faith that all their effort is saving time and making their lives better.

Imagine that you need to learn how to swim. You read books on swimming, you buy a DVD series on the subject, you participate in a webinar about it. Maybe you install several apps on your phone that track your swim time and help you find the nearest pool. You do everything you can to learn how to swim except get into the water. More and more, this is our approach to problem-solving.

We have endured incredible hardship and unspeakable tragedy, but we developed a coping mechanism to prevent us from slipping into despair. It’s called the hedonic treadmill. It’s a tendency in our species to adjust our mood so that no matter what terrible things happen, we quickly return to the same level of happiness we enjoyed before the traumatic event. There’s a catch, though: It also works in reverse. In other words, if an incredibly happy change occurs in our lives, we don’t move forward as happier people. Instead, the hedonic treadmill brings us right back to the state of mind we were in before the raise in pay, new house, or lost weight. It means that, for many of us, we are never satisfied.

“Our level of happiness may change transiently in response to life events, but then almost always returns to its baseline level as we habituate to those events and their consequences over time.”

As the nineteenth-century economist Henry George wrote, a human is “the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.”

Technology can do many things for us—extend our lives, keep us safe, expand our entertainment options—but it cannot make us happy. The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.

Still, there are a few things that all humans can learn to do well without training: play, think, connect socially, react emotionally, count, and think about ourselves.

Essentially, we are working our way out of happiness and well-being. We’ve lost the balance between striving to improve and feeling gratitude for what we have. We’ve lost touch with the things that really enrich our lives and make us feel content. We’ve spent billions of dollars in the past decade or so finding replacements for what we as human beings already do well.

“I can hunch over my computer screen for half the day churning frenetically through emails without getting much of substance done,” writes Dan Pallotta in the Harvard Business Review, “all the while telling myself what a loser I am, and leave at 6:00 p.m. feeling like I put in a full day. And given my level of mental fatigue, I did!”

Many of us are exhausting ourselves this way, working very hard at things that accomplish very little of substance but feel necessary. To a large extent, the solution to this problem is to correct our misperceptions. In the way that those with body dysmorphia see something other than the truth in the mirror, the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something. The truth is, overwork reduces productivity.

Research shows you can lift your mood simply by taking a walk;

Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.” That’s the kind of leisure I hope we can all make time for. It’s what humans were meant to enjoy and what we need in order to function at our highest levels.

We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.

Is it always desirable to go faster, get to places quicker, increase speed, and reduce the time it takes to accomplish something? Or are there inherent benefits to slowing down from time to time?

The organization’s manifesto declares, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.” The group encourages people to enjoy the process of preparing food, of tasting every bite, of enjoying conversation with others at the table. There are now Slow Food chapters in more than 150 countries.

The most significant reason that I resigned from my full-time position and started my own company was a desire to gain control of my time. I was so busy that I felt my work was controlling my life and dictating all of my decisions, and I knew that it wasn’t making me happier.

There is no denying that having enough money makes things much easier. But throughout all those years of struggle, I thought life with more money would mean happiness and an end to stress. That didn’t happen.

It’s a very simple thing, to step on a train and stop worrying about the time it takes to travel, but in this age of escalation and ever-increasing speeds, it felt like a revolutionary act. I had several offers to deliver speeches during those two weeks and could have earned a significant amount of money, but instead I sat in a railcar chatting with folks and reading mystery novels. In the end, I think I chose the most valuable use of my time.

They take time to plug into the local culture instead of racing through a list of tourist traps.”

What I learned is that if you don’t consciously choose a slower path, you will likely default to the pedal-to-the-metal speeds of modern life.

Medieval peasants worked, on average, far fewer hours than we do today, and they enjoyed significantly more vacation time. It may feel as though we’ve always had to work at least forty hours a week in order to make a living, but that’s actually a relatively recent phenomenon.

Before the industrial age began in Britain in 1760, most people lived by the same habits their ancestors had going back to the time of Plato and Aristotle. Their day began with the sunrise and ended as the fiery star disappeared below the horizon. Human life paralleled that of the birds.

And yet perhaps the most direct stimulus of the industrial era occurred in Scotland at the University of Glasgow, when a mostly self-taught instrument maker named James Watt was asked to repair a Newcomen steam engine. He fixed it, but found the engine still put out very little power. So he started fiddling with the machinery and experimenting with steam until he developed a model that used 75 percent less fuel than the Newcomen and was considerably more powerful. More than a decade later, in 1776, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the first Watt engines were being sold commercially and installed in Great Britain.

Over the course of a day, a farmer might accomplish a vast variety of tasks: tending animals, watering crops, trapping pests, repairing fences, and any number of other duties. When those farmers became factory workers, they lost the variety in their working days and ended up performing the same mindless, monotonous task while standing in the same position for ten to fourteen hours a day.

As the industrial era chugged ahead, craftsmen were pulled into the factories. A glassblower couldn’t compete with a glass factory. So he sold his tools and took up a position on a factory floor, where the instruments and machinery were owned not by workers but by the employer. When a worker left a job, he no longer took with him the means to find new work. He relied entirely on a new employer to supply the tools and the resources. Again, this was a significant transfer of power. Because of this shift, the world lost many of its specialized artists and woodworkers and sculptors and metalsmiths. (Here’s an interesting exercise: Take a look at some pictures of England’s Houses of Parliament, built between 1839 and 1842. Imagine how much it would cost to have all that work done today and you’ll understand one aspect of what was abandoned when we lost our craftsman class.) In factories, workers usually didn’t develop the same pride in their work as they churned out dozens of items every day.

So how does this history connect to our lives in the twenty-first century? I didn’t see the connection until I began to learn about the battles over hours and the accepted definition of a “reasonable” working day. Before the nineteenth century, people worked an average of six to eight hours a day and enjoyed dozens of days off throughout the year. In fact, even those in the lowest strata of society spent as much time at rest as they did at labor. Quite suddenly, people were expected to work punishing hours with no time off.

Remember this: The fight over working hours has, from the start, been about returning to the kind of life we had for millennia.

Consider for just a moment how painfully our ancestors suffered and how hard they worked to secure fewer working hours for themselves and their children. Today, less than a hundred years later, we’ve ceded that ground almost without a fight. We choose to work long hours and answer work texts because we think it’s the only way to keep our jobs or do them well. But it has not always been like this. Our habits can change because it hasn’t been all that long since we started following them.

Yet we’ve known for more than a hundred years that long hours of toil don’t actually increase productivity. We have data on this going back to the 1800s—at the time when unions forced employers to cut hours, factory owners were surprised to find that productivity increased while accidents decreased. Overwork was counterproductive in the days of the sweatshop, and research shows it still is, even in the age of the knowledge worker.

This isn’t just about working hours, of course. It’s no surprise that employers will try to get as many hours as they can from their workers and employees will often put in extra time voluntarily in order to earn promotions or raises. That’s understandable. But we are where we are now because of what happened after the victory over working hours. When employers lost the political fight, they moved to a new field of battle: culture.

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “An Apology for Idlers,” 1877

Even today, despite the income gap being higher in the United States than in almost any other nation, many Americans believe they can rise to riches through honest labor, and that belief fuels a willingness to work too much, even when we’re not reaping the profits of our labor.

The psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Jacinth J. X. Tan studied American views on social mobility for a paper published in 2015. They concluded, “Beliefs in the American Dream permeate our parenting decisions, educational practices, and political agendas, and yet, according to data we present in this manuscript, Americans are largely inaccurate when asked to describe actual trends in social class mobility in society.”

This belief in hard work as a virtue and a life philosophy started on the door of a church in Germany. Over the course of a couple hundred years, the religious notion that working long and hard makes you deserving while taking time off makes you lazy was adopted as an economic policy, a way to motivate employees and get the most out of them.

This is the philosophical underpinning of all our modern stress: that time is too valuable to waste. We don’t pass time, we spend it. It’s no wonder that we don’t really have pastimes anymore.

As the Georgetown economist Karl Widerquist said, “This prediction is not so much an error as a puzzle: how can the one plus one so correctly predicted by Keynes have failed to equal two? … It didn’t seem logical to people in 1930 that the economy could continue to grow without freeing us from the struggle for survival.” And it doesn’t seem logical to me either, nearly ninety years after Keynes’s predictions.

Why do I have more to do than my grandmother, despite owning a dishwasher, microwave, and portable computer?

Sadly, two things occurred that prevented a drop in working hours: a rise in consumerism and a steep rise in income inequality.

Another reason many of us now define ourselves by our job titles is pay scale. In order for all workers to benefit from a rise in profits, all workers would have to get a reasonable portion of those profits. Instead, between the 1960s and today, worker pay has stagnated or grown slowly (when adjusted for inflation), whereas CEO pay has skyrocketed. The profits that Keynes thought would fund a more leisurely lifestyle for all have mostly gone to a tiny percentage of the population.

This is partly why so many people feel they are working an incredible number of hours without making progress financially: The benefits of their hard work are accruing in someone else’s account.

According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, pay for non-management workers increased by less than 12 percent between 1978 and 2016. On the other hand, CEO pay jumped by more than 800 percent if you include stock options.

We marvel at the luxury enjoyed by English dukes and German barons of bygone eras, but the top earners now live more lavishly than the Crawley family in Downton Abbey. The only difference is the income gap is wider today between CEOs and their worker...

So, after the industrial age took hold, workers put in more hours, became less likely to own their tools, and were less invested in the end product than they had...

Also, the Calvinistic belief that work is virtuous and idleness is sin had been transformed into a faith in capitalism to reward those w...

People became used to the habits of the workplace—staying busy, competing with coworkers, constantly searching for improvements in efficiency—and they began to take those habits home. In America, the United Kingdom, and Australia especially, people began to notice how much time they spent at home on seemingly worthless activities. They began to feel they didn’t have time to waste on board games and coin collecting.

The Nobel Prize– winning economist Gary S. Becker wrote in 1965: “If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago. When people are paid more, they work longer hours because work is so much more profitable than leisure.” Now the average American works 140 hours more per year than the average British citizen and 300 hours more than the average worker in France. We are trading leisure time for money, and because wages haven’t grown much, the trade isn’t a good one.

The sense that time was too valuable to be spent at a barbecue or baseball game started to make people feel anxious about what they did in their off-hours. Leisure began to feel stressful. In the back of their m...