Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

This trend toward using every minute profitably had been strengthening for centuries by the time the 1970s came to a close. Yet some kind of balance had been maintained between work hours and free time; a shaky but real separation existed between the habits of the...

In recent years, younger people have resisted that pressure and have consequently been shamed by the broader society. Millennials are choosing to spend their money on experiences instead of things. Rather than choosing jobs that offer the highest pay, younger people are looking for employers who share their values, and 84 percent believe they are duty-bound to change the world. Not surprisingly, the global economy blames millennials for killing off the diamond market, department stores, the auto industry, the travel industry, and casinos.

While all of these forces were pulling and tugging on national economies, a fascinating cultural evolution occurred in the late twentieth century. Leaving out the extreme ends of the income spectrum (billionaires and their millionaire friends, along with the poor on the other end), the cultural emphasis shifted from luxury to busyness. People stopped bragging about their flat-screen TVs and started “complaining” about their packed schedules. Status was awarded not because you had an iPhone; everyone seemed to have an iPhone. Instead, people earned respect according to how little free time they had.

If I took two weeks off, my department would fall apart. Literally fall apart,” she told me. Obviously, I don’t think her colleagues would be incapable of functioning without her presence, but her message to me was clear: I am indispensable. I am busy because I am important.

Complaining about how little time we have has become one of the most common activities of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Researchers noted the change years ago and began investigating the phenomenon of busyness as status symbol.

a person who’s very busy is implicitly bragging about their intrinsic worth, their own intelligence. They might talk about all the appointments and tasks on their calendar or they may respond to most invitations by saying, “I’ll have to check my schedule.” When you ask how they are, instead of saying, “Fine,” they might say, “Busy!”

We get a shot of dopamine in our brains when we purchase something, and we can become literally addicted to acquisition.

In the book Revisiting Keynes, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga argue that our excitement over buying a new thing is intense but short-lived. “The average consumer,” they said, “grows accustomed to what he has purchased and … rapidly aspires to own the next product in line.” So while Keynes predicted that we’d all be working very little by now, the rise in unnecessary consumption was part of what made him wrong.

The glorification of consumerism creates a vicious cycle. We work longer and longer hours in order to buy products that we think will make our lives better, we stop enjoying them fairly quickly, the products themselves require time and maintenance that cut into our free time, this makes us unhappy, so we...

Recall the 1965 quote I shared earlier from economist and sociologist Gary S. Becker: “When people are paid more, they work longer hours because work is so much more profitable than leisure.” This remains true for even the top earners.

Since there is always something else to buy, there is never enough money for those of us in the middle class, and that means we are never working enough hours. The end result is that our off-hours start to feel stressful. Time is money, and we feel guilty when we waste it doing unproductive and unprofitable things.

In the 1980s, blue-collar workers worked longer hours than did salaried employees, meaning that a lower income meant longer workdays. That has since been turned on its head. Now college-educated workers are twice as likely as their blue-collar counterparts to work more than forty hours a week.

A survey of golfers in 2015 showed most think it takes too long to play eighteen holes. Players younger than forty-five said they’d prefer to play for only ninety minutes or so, and many courses now offer nine-hole games. This impatience shows up in all kinds of industries: People even listen to podcasts and audiobooks at double or even triple speed in order to get through them more quickly.

Deep down, I think we understand where our priorities should lie. When people are asked in surveys, they usually say they’d rather have time off than more money. Polls in Europe and North America repeatedly show people putting a higher value on leisure time than on stuff. In response, corporations have invested very heavily in changing our minds on that subject. As the writer J. R. Benjamin said, “One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.”

We have sacrificed quite a bit at the altar of hard work and long hours. We have traded our privacy, our communities, our hobbies, and our peace of mind for habits that are more commercially profitable. The overriding question is this: Is it worth it? For the past few decades, our answer has been yes, but it may be time to think again.

In study after study, we’ve found that we are slower at completing tasks when we switch from one activity to another than we are when we simply repeat the same activity. In other words, if you shut down every tab of your browser, mute your phone, and close your email inbox, you’ll finish the memo you’re writing in significantly less time.

There was simply too much to do. Instead of deciding to do less, many moms believed they could solve home problems the way they solved issues in the office. They were swayed by the appeal of efficiency and productivity in the workplace and began to bring those values into family life. More hours would mean higher quality, right? So putting in more hours with your kid would result in a happier, smarter, more successful child. No more latchkey kids. Between the years of 1986 and 2006, the number of children who said they were under surveillance at all times doubled.

You didn’t nurture a successful adult; you made it more likely your child would not be prepared for the pressures and responsibilities of adulthood.

A report from the New York Times on the “motherhood penalty” began with the following stark sentence: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children.”

Going to the coffee shop and chatting with friends for a couple hours will leave you feeling refreshed and upbeat; the time you spend surfing the web will exhaust your brain and deplete your resources.

Because we’re tired, we often double down on the very habits that exhausted us in the first place: email instead of phone calls, getting up earlier in order to get things done before work, buying a new productivity journal, listening to a podcast that promises to “hack your anxiety.”

All of us, both men and women, are subject to an unnatural pressure to constantly work harder and better. We are all caught in a system that demands ever greater improvements in efficiency.

Working longer hours is not likely to bring you significant bumps in pay, but it will take a toll on your well-being. Answering emails in your off-hours is having a more damaging impact on your life than you realize, and a cupcake that has a messy smear of frosting on the top usually tastes just as good as one that is carefully decorated following a YouTube tutorial on baking.

When John Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he stood one day outside a West Virginia coal mine, shaking hands with the miners as they came out with coal-blackened faces. One miner stopped and said to Kennedy, “I understand you’ve never had to work a day in your life.” Kennedy admitted it was true. “You haven’t missed a thing,” came back the deadpan answer. —JACK GRAHAM A Man of God: Essential Priorities for Every Man’s Life, 2007

Humans don’t need to work in order to be happy.

For centuries now, the Protestant faith has been among the most vigorous in declaring the virtue of work and the shamefulness of even short periods of idleness. This emphasis has become so embedded in our psyches that research shows emotional trauma caused by unemployment is actually 40 percent more severe among Protestants.

The economics professor Davide Cantoni studied this phenomenon and concluded that while Protestantism doesn’t make you wealthier, money doesn’t seem to be the point. “Work becomes the object in itself,” Cantoni concluded. This idea has been confirmed by other researchers. The University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel says people put in long hours not for “rewards, punishments, or obligation” but because “many feel existentially lost without the driving structure of work in their life—even if that structure is neither proportionally profitable nor healthy in a physical or psychological sense.”

It should come as no surprise that the connection between employment and identity can be traced back to the dawn of the industrial age. Prior to that time, people were more likely to ask about a person’s family than about their job.

If you’ve been told for more than half a century that hard work is patriotic, that it is what separates a good person from a contemptible person, and that labor is part of the dues one must pay in order to earn entrance to heaven, what might happen when that labor ends and your life continues?

It’s quite true that having important work to do can lead to a mood boost. In fact, a survey of 485 separate studies demonstrated conclusively that people who like their work are more likely to be healthy in body and mind. Also, they are less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than those who are either unemployed or who don’t like their jobs. Research commissioned by the United Kingdom also showed the damage caused by not having a job outweighs the stress of having one.

This is all compelling, but ultimately unconvincing. When defending the idea that work is necessary for human happiness, some point to research that shows people live longer if they have a sense of purpose. I find that argument irrelevant, since one’s purpose does not have to be tied up with one’s job.

Stay-at-home parents, for example, can have an incredibly strong sense of purpose. Vincent van Gogh was basically unemployed. He sold only one painting during his lifetime, and yet his lack of financial success never weakened his sense of purpose or dedication to his art.

we know that for every extra year a person works, their chance of suffering deme...

I think the benefits conveyed by a meaningful career may stem from the value and emphasis placed on work by our culture, not by nature. I think it’s stressful to be unemployed because most of us live paycheck to paycheck and because we lose status among our family and friends when we don’t have a job title.

At heart, I believe work is a tool that can be used to fulfill other needs, but is not a requirement in and of itself. Consider this updated list of human needs, posited by the neuroscientist Nicole Gravagna: 1. Food 2. Water 3. Shelter 4. Sleep 5. Human connection 6. Novelty

There are many examples of people who’ve been relieved of a need to work, and they are no more unhealthy than the rest of us. Men who don’t work are not more likely to abuse alcohol or get a divorce. They’re also not at higher risk of dying compared to their cohorts who have full-time jobs.

If you sift through historical documents, you’ll find that some of the most productive minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries worked only about four hours a day. Charles Darwin, Ingmar Bergman, Charles Dickens, and the incredibly prolific mathematician Henri Poincaré all worked for just a small portion of each day.

The artist Caravaggio reportedly partied for a month every time he finished a piece. While he was working on Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert put in about five hours each day writing, and spent the rest of the day reading, strolling with family members, talking with his mother, enjoying a bit of chocolate, smoking a pipe, and taking a hot bath. The novelist Thomas Mann wrote for only about three hours a day.

This is also a good moment to take stock of how damaging our work ethic is at times. It’s not the emphasis on hard work that’s toxic, but the obsession with it. We now live in a culture in which we are not happy being and only satisfied when we’re doing.

Emerson said that “beauty is its own excuse for being,” but that’s not true of labor. Labor needs a reason.

My sample size is one, but it’s a useful experiment to carry out in your own life. I proved to myself that I don’t need forty to sixty hours a week of focused work. In fact, despite a drastic cut in hours, I’d been more productive by the end of the thirty days. On average, I write about 1,000 words a day, respond to 54 emails and messages, and read about 400 pages of research. During the time when I was not watching the clock but focusing on my tasks until I couldn’t focus any longer, I wrote an incredible 1,600 words a day and read about 550 pages. My email numbers stayed about the same.

The bottom line is that work is not always good and healthy. According to data from the United Nations, work kills more than twice as many people annually than war does and more than both drugs and alcohol combined.

So if we see health benefits from working, it could be because of tenets that have been drilled into our heads to make us feel ashamed for being idle. We feel better when we’re working because society tells us we should feel bad if we’re not.

If too much work causes harm, that probably means a reasonable amount of idleness is healthy and that well-being demands a balance between labor and leisure. That’s a fair summary of Idle Theory. Idle Theory posits that we make ourselves weaker by working too hard and that lazier creatures have an evolutionary advantage. Every living being has to do some work in order to stay alive, of course. According to Idle Theory, the entities that meet their survival needs with the least amount of work are most likely to survive. Chris Davis, one of the original proponents of this theory, calls it “Survival of the Idlest.” This echoes an old quote often misattributed to Bill Gates that suggests that when there’s a tough job to be done, it’s best to look for the laziest workers because they’ll find the easiest way to get it done.

It appears that sentiment was first expressed by a Chrysler executive named Clarence Bleicher. He testified before a Senate committee in 1947 and said: “The lazy man will find an easy way to do it. He may not do much, but he will find an easy way to do it …. That has been my experience.”

Idle Theory suggests that placing a value on laziness is not just a good corporate strategy but a solid evolutionary one. And there are some who even say laziness is the underlying motivation beneath a great deal of innovation. “The first person who thought of putting a sail on a boat wanted to get out of rowing. Whoever hitched a plow to an ox was looking for a way to escape digging. Whoever harnessed a waterfall to grind grain hated pounding it with rocks,” wrote Fred Gratzon in his 2003 book The Lazy Way to Success. One might even say the Industrial Revolution began when a Scotsman figured out he could plug a loom into an engine and avoid driving horses in a circle all day.

Darwin believed existence is a war and the strong prevail. If you buy in to Idle Theory, existence is actually a struggle to be idle and the most successful, like lions, balance intense periods of activity with hours spent lounging in the sun of sub-Saharan Africa.

Idleness is really time in which one is not actively pursuing a profitable goal. It means you are at leisure. There is considerable scientific research demonstrating that idleness is good for you. There is even a good deal of clinical study that suggests idleness is associated with high intelligence. One study at Florida Gulf Coast University discovered a link between a lack of activity and deeper thinkers, although the sample size was incredibly small (only sixty students).

Another study showed that people who worked about fifty-five hours a week scored lower on cognitive tests than those who worked about forty. Decades of research demonstrate that we are more creative, more insightful, and generally sharper when we allow ourselves a significant amount of leisure time. It makes sense, too, when you think back to times in your life when you worked a considerable amount of overtime. Do you think you were in the right frame of mind then to think creatively or carefully?

As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, writes: “Darwin and Lubbock, and many other creative and productive figures, weren’t accomplished despite their leisure; they were accomplished because of it.”