WRT-0003 'An Incomplete History of Doing Nothing'

There is no comprehensive record of humanity's relationship with doing nothing, because the people best qualified to write it were, at the time, doing nothing. This is both the central challenge and the central appeal of the subject.

The Problem of Documentation

History is written by the active. The builders, the conquerors, the people who could not sit still for five consecutive minutes. The great practitioners of doing nothing left no monuments, no manifestos, no TED talks. They left, at most, a warm impression on a sofa cushion and the lingering suspicion that they might have been on to something.

This creates a survivorship bias in the historical record. We know everything about what people did. We know almost nothing about what they deliberately chose not to do. The second category may be more interesting.

A Brief and Incomplete Timeline

In approximately 400 BC, Diogenes of Sinope lived in a barrel and told Alexander the Great to move because he was blocking the sun. This is perhaps the most celebrated instance of doing nothing in the Western canon. Diogenes did not build anything. He did not conquer anything. He sat in a barrel and complained about the light. He is remembered two thousand years later.

The monks of various contemplative orders spent centuries perfecting the art of sitting quietly in rooms. They called it meditation, or prayer, or contemplation, depending on the tradition. The result was the same: a person, sitting, not doing anything that could be described as productive by any modern metric.

The Modern Crisis

The contemporary world has declared war on doing nothing. Every spare moment must be optimized, monetized, or at minimum documented for social media. The phone in your pocket is an anti-nothing device — a machine specifically engineered to ensure that you are always doing something, even if that something is scrolling through photographs of other people's lunches.

This has created a paradox. We have more labor-saving devices than any civilization in history. We have less nothing than any civilization in history. The devices saved the labor but filled the void with content.

Conclusions

This essay was intended to be longer, but the author ran out of motivation approximately two-thirds of the way through. This seems appropriate. A complete history of doing nothing would be a contradiction in terms. The incomplete version is the only honest one.