Marginalia ~ The Art of Doing Nothing
Marginalia ~ The Art of Doing Nothing
Hi everyone,
According to the physicist Lawrence Krauss:
“Richard Feynman used to go up to people all the time and he'd say, ‘You won't believe what happened to me today.’ And people would say, ‘What?’ And he'd say, ‘Absolutely nothing’. Because we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special and significant.”
Now, I’m no less susceptible than anyone else to the idea that what happens to me is significant, but I was reminded of Feynman’s little game this week while practicing the painfully difficult art of doing nothing. That should be capitalised as Doing Nothing, because practicing this as a conscious effort is very different from listlessly idling away time out of boredom or to procrastinate from things you don’t want to do.
It turns out, there’s such an art to this Doing Nothing that a whole sub-category of self-help has arisen to guide people through the anxiety of putting your life down for any stretch of time. I recently stumbled across a cottage industry of YouTubers who demonstrate how they spend whole hours Doing Nothing. Reader, I am forced to admit that in spite of my cynicism, I have succumbed to the soothing, ASMR-like quality of such videos. These people spread out blankets in picturesque fields to nap, or they (and this word was used more than once) “frolic” among flowers, or they take an inordinate amount of time to slowly and “purposefully” (another word used often) steep a cup of tea – all without (get this!) a podcast or the news or Netflix playing in the background. They actually do one thing at a time, which so startled me I had to lie down. While watching a Netflix movie and reading a book.
Watching people Do Nothing has inspired me to attempt the same. So this week, I have been writing all morning, reading for an hour after lunch, and then deliberately leaving the rest of the afternoon unplanned. For the most part, I have used this free time to do housework, but as I grow accustomed to looking up from writing and facing a few hours with nothing I have to do, I hope to start drawing (something I enjoyed as a kid) and walking in nature (something the homebody writer in me balks at).
I encourage others to give this a go, and to do it somewhat paradoxically with the kind of deliberate effort you would put into cultivating an exercise habit. Without intent, it’s too easy for this kind of free-time to get filled with busywork or stressing about the lack of productivity happening at that time. One resource I wholeheartedly endorse, and have been using myself for a few years now, is the Waking Up app from Sam Harris.
It’s primarily a meditation app, although there is now a section called “Life”, in which various thinkers examine life beyond the meditative act. There is a series on the app called “Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman, and it is fantastic. Here is a link to a free trial of the app.
I have zero affiliation with Waking Up (I wish) and am making no money at all from this. It’s just something working for me, so I don’t want to keep it a secret.
I’ll see you all here in September for the next issue of Art Of Conversation. In the meantime, all the best.
Matthew
What I've been reading:
The heatwave that my otherwise reliably cold and drizzly nation has succumbed to over the last couple of weeks has stolen my sleep (nowhere in my apartment, even in the wee hours, is cooler than 27 degrees) and sapped my mental energy, so I’ve been largely re-reading comfort books. I have, however, picked up one novel I haven’t read before and have been dipping in and out of it between pouring buckets of cold water over my head. That book is Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
I’d seen the movie when I was much younger, and all I recalled of it was that it was one of the most bleak things I’d sat through. While I didn’t think it was a bad movie, I couldn’t say I enjoyed it as such, and my memory of the domestic misery it depicted put me off trying the book for many years. Having recently picked it up and finding myself absorbed into the writing within a few pages, I decided now was the time. My god. It’s as bleak as I remember the movie being.
It’s my job – at least here at Art Of Conversation – to find links between seemingly unrelated cultural artefacts, and the thing that I kept thinking of while reading Revolutionary Road might well seem a million miles away from a literary novel published in the sixties, but here it is: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Both the novel and the sitcom depict people in situations that seem on their face to be pro-social – a suburban family and a small group of friends who co-own a pub – but are deeply anti-social, and at their core self-serving and misanthropic. Everyone in Revolutionary Road is a Janus, showing a kindly face to their friends and and a judgmental, scornful face behind their backs; a loving, committed face to their husband or wife, and a feckless, faithless one in private. Everyone in It’s Always Sunny is forever taking every opportunity to further their own cause and will gladly step on their friends to get there.
Both the novel and the sitcom can be said to be reactions against a dominant form of sociality in their times. Revolutionary Road is about waking up to the nightmarish reality of the American Dream, about discovering that the way of life lived by your father has failed you. It’s Always Sunny reacts against the false glamour and seductive solipsism of the traditional American sitcom. I’ve always maintained that Friends is a far more cynical show than It’s Always Sunny, because those New York characters were just as self-involved and myopic as the Philly gang, but they hid their selfishness beneath an appealing veneer of “I’ll be there for you” saccharine.
But the long and the short of my comparison between Revolutionary Road and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia comes down to this: At least It’s Always Sunny is funny. The book, on the other hand, gets fairly miserable. It’s worth understanding the historical moment it’s situated in and to understand what it was reacting against, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to spend 300 pages with characters who look down on their only friends, cheat on their wives, and scream at their children.
Or maybe the heat is getting to me. Maybe I’ll enjoy the book more in autumn.
What I've been watching:
Back in the heady, hedonistic days of pre-recession spending, when cinemas were flush with new movies worth seeing and I was flush with enough cash to have a membership with my local cinema, I got to see an advance screening of a movie called American Animals. This week – with nothing to see at the cinema but the same four blockbusters all cinemas have been showing for the last few weeks and with my bank account so close to empty I'm expecting a call from the bank any day now, just to check I'm still alive – I began rewatching some favourite films. American Animals was among them, and wow, does it stand up to repeat viewing.
The film is directed by Bart Layton, and it's either his first narrative film or his second documentary, depending on how you view it. Layton's first film was a straight-up documentary that supplemented its interviews and news footage with re-enactments by actors. American Animals, by contrast, is mostly told in scripted scenes with actors but is buttressed by interviews with the real people these actors play. In one brilliant moment, an actor turns to one of the real people, suddenly brought into shot, and asks if this scene playing out is the way he remembers it. "Not really..." the real person responds.
Story-wise, the film recounts the dramatic and dramatically inept heist of rare books by four college kids back in 2004. Thematically, it covers truth and lies in fiction (which inspired September’s upcoming essay), being special versus being happy, and whether you can shortcut your way to a meaningful life. It’s well worth watching.