We Should All Waste More Time

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Wasting time is a radical rebellion.

This post is now a podcast episode!

What was your gut reaction when you read the title of this post? Did you feel unaccountably uncomfortable? Did the judgy part of you clear her throat? In our culture we are given two ideological choices of how to use time: wisely, or wastefully. One good, one bad. When I first started wasting time as an intentional personal practice (yes, you read that right), I felt like a bad person. I felt lazy, ungrateful, spoiled…all the negative things we’re taught to think about people who don’t diligently apply themselves to getting it all done. The indoctrination runs deep. See if you can complete any of the following: 

  • Early to bed, early to rise…

  • Strike while the…

  • Pull yourself up by your…

  • Idle hands are… 

You probably know at least one – we memorize such sayings in childhood. There are hundreds more, proliferating everywhere from your Facebook feed to the walls of your workplace or gym. They glorify our cultural approbation of hard work, getting ahead, and keeping busy, and structure our understanding of how we should conduct our lives. Industrious activity is seen as the way to succeed, but it’s more than that. It’s ingrained in us as a moral virtue. People who work hard are good people; we admire them. We believe they should be rewarded because they deserve to be. 

Think about how we talk about not getting things done. It always carries a stigma. It was an unproductive day. I lazed about. I did nothing. Is it even possible to communicate this in an unequivocally positive way? The best we can do is something like, It was a restful day. But even then, we’re doing something of value – we’re resting so we can be ready for more work. Wasting time feels bad because we’re supposed to feel bad about it. 

This is why we have a cult of busy. Creating busyness in our lives makes us feel like we are one of the good people, and it allows us to signal our worthiness to others. Busyness is a social status symbol and a way of self-medicating difficult feelings regarding our own value. How much busy is ideal? Being a little too busy. The kind of busy that you can show off with that tone of light exasperation everyone instantly recognizes: I’m just so busy, I barely have a moment to myself! Feeling that overwhelm – or giving the impression of it – is how we know we are part of the cool kids’ club (cult) of busy.

That’s bullshit. Being too busy isn’t a badge of honor. It just means you overscheduled yourself. Of course some of the ways our time gets used are out of our control, but we all can make choices about how busy we want to be. Sometimes those choices are hard, and you have to make sacrifices. People who say they wish they weren’t so busy are really saying that they’re too scared to make those changes. They don’t know how to exist without busy.

I started a personal practice of wasting time because I wanted to stop feeling that overwhelm of having to get all the things done. I wanted to cure my burnout. But I realized the practice had a larger value than just changing my own life. Intentionally wasting time is a radical rebellion in the face of our cultural indoctrination. It’s a rejection of the societal moralizing (laziness is a sin) and the capitalist valuation of human activity (time is money) that keep many of us from living our best lives. We all know the world is changing, that we’re entering a new era politically, economically, and culturally. It’s time to examine and subvert our limiting indoctrinated beliefs.

So how do you intentionally waste time? Here’s how I start. Whenever that anxiety comes on that I should be getting all the things done, I sit. I do nothing. I don’t try to use the time to meditate or “rest.” I sit and stare at a wall or out a window and let my mind wander, and sometimes I switch on a tv show as background static. I sit through that urgent feeling that there are all these things I need to do and the accompanying discomfort of leaving them undone. I tell myself that the urgency isn’t real, and that most of these things don’t actually need to get done at all. Eventually my mind always comes to rest on something I want to do. And I do that thing.

This practice helps fill my life with spirit-sustaining activities to the detriment of soul-destroying busywork. Like any mindful practice it can be challenging, but you will begin to see changes in your approach to life if you stick with it.

Are You Still Searching for a Job That’s the Right Fit?

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Maybe trying to find the “right” job is the wrong approach.

I’m one of the many creatives who decided early on that I would pursue “regular” jobs rather than attempt a creative career. As a writer of fiction, I was realistic about my chances of ever making a living off of it. So I tried to find jobs that were “parallel” to my writing, jobs that involved writing and that would allow me to be a novelist in my spare time. This failed on two fronts. I didn’t end up writing many novels, let alone publishing any, and I found myself severely burned out by the time I was in my mid-thirties. I’d always believed that there was a “right” job out there for me, but I never found it. I tried one thing and then another, and failed to capitalize on my experiences and build a career of note. 

I never could get the hang of the linear, progressive career trajectory, and this made me feel that something was wrong with me. What I realize now is that my story is typical for creatives. The problem isn’t us. It’s that we are part of a system that tries to assimilate those who would live by a different set of values. Creatives just aren’t that good for the economy. We want to do what we want to do, and when a job ceases to inspire us, we cannot stay in it and remain sane. On top of this, we have very limited reserves for dealing with bullshit. So our work histories often look patchy, and we get questions about why we haven’t made anything of ourselves, given our talents.

This perspective is built on faulty assumptions about what we should want or pursue in our working lives. Let’s tear some of those assumptions down.  

Career trajectory is a lie

The idea of a career trajectory is just that: an idea. It’s an idealized model of what a “successful” career looks like that has emerged from a system that values the productive capacity of workers. A successful worker is someone who is consistently productive up to the point of no longer being able to contribute, i.e. retirement. The problem is that fulfilling work and a successful career are usually at odds, because they operate on opposing tracks. A traditional career trajectory is meant to benefit the organization you work for, and through that the larger economy. People who stay in one industry and move up the promotion ladder are efficient cogs in a smoothly running machine. A fulfilling career, on the other hand, is for the benefit of the worker. It may sometimes happily coincide with the ideal career trajectory, but mostly not. It may have starts and stops, an industry switch, retraining, or any number of inefficient moves. The system, while paying lip service to the idea of a fulfilling career, will punish you in numerous ways for trying to have one. Anything like a spotty work history or one that seems to lack focus will be a detriment in job hunting. And thus the truth is revealed: the system does not actually want you to be fulfilled by your work, unless it is a side effect of your productive capacity.

Creatives are particularly disadvantaged in this system. It’s not because we cannot find fulfilling work. It’s that in order to continue to be fulfilled, we need to feel inspired – and generally working in the same career for our whole lives isn’t going to do it. What feels like the right path can quickly become the wrong one once we have reaped all the inspiration we can from it. Our system likes to frame this experience as that job not having been the right one to begin with. This puts the responsibility squarely on the worker to find the job that will be “the one,” in which they can finally fulfill the capitalist requirement of sustained productivity. But creatives are not linear people, nor do we function well within rationalized systems that constrain creativity. We usually end up blaming ourselves for being “unfocused,” “lazy,” “selfish,” or any other negative character trait the system likes to assign to people who fail at traditional career trajectory. In this environment, creatives can often begin to distrust their instincts.

No. Trust your instincts. In a system designed around precepts that are fundamentally at odds with how you need to live your life, your choices will inevitably look bad or wrong, or perhaps even like failures. They’re not. 

Career trajectories don’t exist anymore, anyway

In high school I can remember being told that kids in my generation were the first who could not expect to do as well as their parents. I imagine this is even more true for youth today. I came up during the era of bankrupt pension funds and a loss of trust in big companies. Now we are transitioning to a gig economy in which long-term, secure jobs with good benefits are increasingly scarce. It’s a painful time to be alive – but some of this is actually good news for creatives. Why? Because we are built for times such as these. We understand job insecurity because we’ve always dealt with being unable to settle down. Many of us already have the experience of patching together a living that allows us to continue our art. And we have a head start on dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that come from not being able to build a traditional career. So keep on doing your thing, creatives! 

You will never “figure things out” (hopefully)

The other day I was listening to a podcast by a woman about a decade younger than me who was talking about how it took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and that she’d finally done it. I remember feeling exactly that way at her age. And I couldn’t help but smile at her confidence and enthusiasm. It’s likely she’ll need to reinvent herself a few more times before her allotted life is over.

Make no mistake: there is no such thing as figuring it out, at least not for all time. You may find something that works now, and it may feel like it’s The Thing, but I can promise you that you will grow to a point where you’ll need something new. This is a good thing! Follow those instincts. Life is long (well, hopefully), so don’t fall for the lie that it should look like education/preparation → marriage/kids → career/savings → retirement/“fun” → decline/death. Instead of feeling inadequate if your life veers around and seems to fold back on itself, be proud of it. “You have to live spherically, in many different directions,” as Federico Fellini said. “Never lose your childish enthusiasm, and things will come your way.” Words to live by for creatives!

Embracing Peak Unproductivity

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Sometimes you just have to lean into the lazy.

We’ve all been feeling it during this pandemic: the creeping malaise, the ennui, the increasing inability to apply ourselves to even the most basic of tasks with any regularity. Like showering. Anyone else? Maybe you, too, are at a point where you decide to eat another snack because it feels vaguely like getting something done. And you desperately need to get something done in order to feel normal and sane and like a worthy human being.

When regular routines have been lost and uncertainty is at an all-time high, this is what it feels like. It’s both anxiety-producing and boring at the same time. On TV, people caught in pandemics seem more vital, don’t they? They band together, use their ingenuity to secure their daily needs. There’s drama, excitement, danger. Think Walking Dead.

Once I went to see a battle reenactment, and it was eye-opening as to the real nature of war. Lots of sitting and waiting. Lots. That’s what real life is like. And that’s what this pandemic is like. We’re all just sitting around waiting for…something. What, we don’t even know. We’re trying to feel as normal as possible and keep up with routines of work and family, but we are failing. And now with things reopening across the country and the future somehow seeming even more uncertain, well…anyone else find themselves so exhausted by circumstances they just zone out completely?

Embrace it. Seriously. One, you can’t really do anything about it. Your brain and body are reacting this way because when there is intense uncertainty, it’s an evolutionary advantage to slow down and conserve energy. If you find yourself zoning out, it’s because that’s what you need to do right now. Trust the instinct, and trust yourself. Come on, you know you’re not a lazy person, even if you feel like one right now! Which brings us to point two: the reason you feel like a lazy worthless human being right now is because that’s what society wants you to feel. Productivity is the fuel that feeds the fires of capitalism and human progress, right? 

But does productivity feed your fire? Right now perhaps you feel like you’ve lost your vitality. But ask yourself this: what, exactly, was it about your former way of life that made you feel vital? Was it the busyness? The routines? Is making productivity a priority worth it if any time you falter, you feel terrible about yourself? Ask yourself: why are you doing all the things? To get them done, or because they sustain your spirit?

Lean into lazy. I mean it. This is an unprecedented time. Use it to experiment. Instead of trying to get something worthwhile done today or tomorrow, try getting nothing done except what you absolutely have to. And be ruthless about what is necessary. Feed the pets/kids/etc.? Sure. Vacuum up the pet hair that is now practically another pet? Nope. Or do what I do – scrape together the most visible piles with your hands and toss those. There, cleaning done! Then do what you feel like in the moment. Even if it’s just sitting there staring at a wall. Tell yourself that anything you do - anything - has value, it’s worthwhile.

Here’s the thing. Most of the standards we hold ourselves to are completely arbitrary. In fact, most of our standards are really just measurements we use to judge ourselves and others. Think about it. It’s not enough to just make money – how much money matters. It’s not enough to have a house to live in – how clean and well-appointed you keep it is the true measure of your home’s value and by extension your personal value. Giving up those standards, rejecting them, is extremely difficult. Because they are how we understand ourselves as worthy human beings – through judging ourselves on a scale of “how much.”

This is why we are struggling right now. The scale is unbalanced. It’s fallen off its fulcrum. It’s disorienting: this shit is hard! But it’s happening regardless of whether we want it to or not. And I think we all know that when this all ends, things won’t get back to normal. Things are changed forever. How can we be ready for this new world? By being open to examining our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and what life should look like. 

Years ago, on the eve of going abroad to live in China, I was given a little card that read “When nothing is sure, everything is possible” (attributed to M. Drabble). The saying has always made me uncomfortable, because it doesn’t make sense to me. How do you even know what is possible if nothing is sure? We all live within certain constraints; how can everything be possible? But there is something hopeful in the idea that we can remake ourselves, our lives, even if it’s only in small ways. 

What are your possibilities? What will you make out of this time of uncertainty?

How I Learned to Be Unproductive

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Creating a spacious life.

Some personalities thrive on busy: time deadlines, packed schedules, multitasking, and to-do lists. You know the type – they’re always just so…well, busy. These are the people who live on the periphery of your life, because you rarely get to see them. They may complain about having so much they need to accomplish every day, but ultimately they have a life like that because they’ve invited that kind of busy into it. Many of the things they “need” to do could be postponed, delegated, or outright left undone.  

I do not have a personality that thrives on busy. Most creatives don’t, because art requires a lot of space around it in order to emerge into being. It’s not that creatives can’t learn to survive a busy life – we can grow adept at fitting creative work into small bits of time – but for many of us our natural preference is toward a slow life. A life that’s more open than closed, loose rather than tight. A life in which our meditative space (mine is long walks) isn’t spoiled by anxious thoughts of the next thing that needs to be done. A spacious life. 

If there is a silver lining to having a severe anxiety disorder, it’s that I become so easily overwhelmed by a packed schedule that I have no choice but to say no to things that “need” to get done. I began creating a spacious life out of necessity, because I was burned out to the point of being unable to do my primary creative and life-giving practice, writing. I whittled my life down to only what was absolutely required. I became a person who accomplished the bare minimum.

At first this felt horrible. My tiny daily accomplishments seemed worthless (I washed the dishes! I shopped for groceries! I paid a bill!). I was socialized to believe that only productive time has value. Think about it: is there any way to say that you did nothing all day that doesn’t sound negative? How do you communicate the value of your time to someone without listing all the things you did during it? It’s harder than you’d think. In the beginning this project of opening up my life caused its own brand of anxiety. I won’t lie – it could be miserable at times. But I felt in my gut that I was doing something important, and that it would eventually pay off.

Here’s what happened. Over time, all those bare minimum tasks began to expand to fill the space I had opened in my life. My little life-sustaining activities began to feel like sacred tasks, part of a daily generative act of living. And I became okay with long stretches of doing…nothing. Wasting time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more with my time, it’s that during my recovery from burnout, I honestly wasn’t capable of much more. I had to be okay with that before I could move through that part of my healing.

In creating a more spacious life, there are significant sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way. I’ve had to reevaluate my feelings about money, for example, as I began to spend less time trying to chase it down. I learned that my best life is a slow life. The rhythm of a simplified, opened-up way of living allowed space for my creativity to reemerge. 

Eventually I was able start writing again. And through the process of creating a spacious life I realized something important. In order to be creative on a large scale I need to be able to experience the generative creativity of even the small, everyday tasks of my life. If I am only doing things to get them done, check them off a list, and prove my productivity, then I will bring that approach to my writing as well. If I keep focused on opening more space in my life, rather than filling it up with yet more busyness, I will prosper in my writing. Learning to live with slowness is more difficult than you’d think, as it goes against everything our culture outwardly values. It requires a willingness to live with the discomfort that comes from going against what our society explicitly condones as “right” choices. But for creatives like myself, it is essential to our well-being.