What Does It Mean to Do Nothing?

We live in a world where a common rebuke is “Don’t just sit there, do something” — so it is no surprise to discover that doing nothing is regarded as kind of weird.

As we have explained in answer to the question, “Why Are We Rushing toward Oblivion,” we humans are all very very busy! And if by chance we are left with the smallest gap between one busyness and another busyness, we anxiously fill it with something… a quick check of our smartphone… anything, but something!

Just how unpopular doing nothing is can be seen from a 2014 study described in Science where they found that 67% of men and 25% of women preferred to give themselves electric shocks rather than just sit and do nothing!

And as Matthew Killingsworth, a psychologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, explains from his own research:

“When people are spending time inside their heads, they’re markedly less happy.”

This is interesting. Those of us conditioned by the modern, Western, scientific paradigm “hate to be alone with ourselves” doing nothing as the author of the Science article put it. Meanwhile, for the last few millennia, the non-Western paradigm has been extolling the relaxation, bliss, and sense of fulfillment from simply “doing nothing.”