Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving – Celeste Headlee
Oddly, our fascination with changing our lives has made us more lonely, unhealthier, and anxious than ever before. The remedy to this state of affairs is easy: make time in your life for genuine pleasure and just do nothing.
The Cult Of Productivity
Our fascination with productivity is making us depressed, stressed out, and physically ill.
As if high productivity were what truly counts in life, we have followed ever-increasing milestones. In the end, we just managed to make ourselves sad.
Contaminated Time: Never Being At Ease
The consequence of contaminated time is that many individuals never feel at ease. And one of the key disadvantages of the new, flexible working hours is this.
Back when we worked every day from 9 to 5, it was easy to realize when the job was finished and our leisure time started. These two realms are much more likely to converge now that our hours are “flexible.”
There are many negative sides to contaminated time. Our imagination and competitiveness are improved by a genuine break from work, which can also improve our immune system.
Spending Quality Time Means It is Limited By Nature
The notion of enjoying “quality time” with family is one way that we can track the penetration of productivity into our personal lives. There is nothing unusual about having to spend time with loved ones; it is always a satisfying remedy to our normal emphasis on “getting things done.”
The idea of quality time suggests that in a few satisfying, condensed, yet unforgettable hours, we can and should pack our family responsibilities.
Bonding time, in other words, is family life tailored to a philosophy of success, a mentality only limited to the office.
A Few Basic Adjustments To Decelerate And Enhance Our Standard Of Life
Many of us have no clue where our time goes.
Our judgment and empathy can be impeded by thinking that we are overstressed, whether or not we work long hours.
One of the very few challenges we can address by simply doing little is our single-minded emphasis on competitiveness.
Although it is as simple as that, what we need to do to actively prepare is to do nothing.
The Never-ending Marathon
If your to-do lists seem to be getting longer every day and you are trying to optimize your hours and hope to find extra hours in the day, you may have fallen victim to the “cult of effectiveness.”
This is a mentality that assumes that the busier we are, the better. And while this movement has never been more dominant than it is right now, it didn’t evolve instantly.
Check Where Your Time Goes
To enhance your time perception, begin by maintaining a list of your tasks. Log all that down, even though it’s just social media surfing.
When you have a good vision of how you are spending your time, build a plan that outlines how you would like to look at your days. Note, this is a timeline that promotes recreation, not efficiency. To encourage yourself to be completely lazy and inefficient, set aside a bunch of time each day.
History Is Embedded In Our Current Obsession With Competitiveness
We have not all worked as hard as we do today. Even peasant farmers spent fewer hours, and they still had more holiday leave than the typical industrial worker!
But in the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution, factory operators began to pay salaries per hour instead of paying staff per assignment. This led to a drastic rise in the number of hours that people were forced to work.
Following Elon Musk or The Kardashians
If we follow top-tier celebrities, some glorified by paid media, we unconsciously convince ourselves that we are not great enough as we associate ourselves with hugely popular outliers like these and that the lives we live are grossly insufficient.
Learn to base your assessments on yourself without caring about someone else or what they may have achieved.
Differentiate Between Means And Ends To Reclaim Our Free Time
One of the challenges of celebrating success and performance is that these ideals can cause us to lose track of the bigger picture. Not only does a society that emphasizes hard work and busyness convince us to ignore free time, but it also allows us to rely on means rather than ends.
Focusing on how much we get accomplished, to be more specific, might cause us to forget what we get accomplished. Most of us are so nervous about checking boxes that we avoid wondering if the stuff we’re doing makes us happy.
How To Do Nothing
Examine the “productive” things you do and make sure that they bring you closer to your long-term goals in life. Is looking at emails on a Sunday morning helping you achieve the things you want in life? If not, forget about it.
Once you learn to drop unrewarding tasks, you’ll find you have much more time for leisure.
We Aim For Productivity In Our Private Relationships
hings have been very simple so far. We also explored the roots of the productivity cult and examined some of the ways jobs can “contaminate” our time off and compete with our pleasure.
One of the most significant points about the rise towards productivity is that it left its roots in the office quite rapidly and became an approach towards life in general.
We May Be Robbed Of Real Interpersonal Relations
The overwhelming majority of individuals lived in rural, close-knit neighborhoods until the Industrial Revolution attracted workers to big cities. People wanted a limited number of close friends, a smaller community of close companions, and a wider network of familiar associates.
Sadly, many of our social needs go unfulfilled these days. The interpersonal bonds of a warm, real-world group cannot be replaced by getting hundreds of “friends” on Facebook.
In our search to make our lives more successful, we have lost a lot of human connection, a reality with unignorable repercussions.
Social Media Makes Comparisons Easy
If we are not cautious, the urge to outshine others will find us engaged in a constant competition to be the most successful and efficient individual on the internet. It is pointless to mention that this is a fight that we will never win.
Comparing ourselves with those around us is human nature. It is doubtful that this fact will change any time soon, and it did not arise in the social media era.
In much the same way, the laws of the game have been fundamentally modified by social media.