Don’t Apologise For Your Vitality, Maintenance and Care
Time and what we do and don’t do with it
Haven’t we all been there? Apologising for something only because we felt we should have, but not because what we were doing was wrong. Well, at least not in our own eyes.
Today will be about vitality, so let’s begin with a quote from An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson:
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.
Unspecified thinking time doesn’t conform to any of the markers of “productivity”. Who makes the rules on that? I think it’s right to be sceptical.
The idea of productivity we adhere to doesn’t come from inside ourselves — we learn to think about this a certain way. And what is that way, exactly?
It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
We have the urge to make it seem like we are doing something important, and so we each apply our own version of “achievement” as a measurable commodity over our pursuits.
How long does it take?
Think of the ridiculousness of our own expectations.
On the other hand, our phones and the addictive design of social media can make a whole hour disappear in what feels like seconds. We are caught between two extremes — feeling as though we need more time in order to do anything, and somehow losing great swathes of time unintentionally. We are no good at understanding how long it takes to do stuff (see Hofstadter’s lawor the Planning fallacy or any number of these “rules”).
Nonsenses
There’s a lot of chat out there about how distracted we are, how our attention spans are getting shorter. This may be true for most people, but none of this is all that surprising — a quick shot of dopamine is irresistible for most of us.
Most of the apps on your phone, and every social media platform, is designed to distract and therefore keep you looking. We all seem to know this by now, and yet... Many of us convince ourselves that we can watch a video or scroll a news feed while we are doing other things — or that somehow, we can ‘use’ distraction and restlessness to our advantage. We think we can multitask.
Turns out, not really…
We think we’re being super efficient by listening to the podcast and “thinking” simultaneously, but the reality is we aren’t doing both — we kinda do neither. To quote Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks:
When you’re faced with too many demand, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer [instead] of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask…
This is us trying to control time better, he says, and it sets us up for failure. This is because, instead of just “being time” as he calls it, we are always trying to evaluate our time for its future usefulness.
Living this way, the present moment falls away, and instead of mastering your time, as Burkeman points out, it “ends up mastering you.”
You’re living forever in the promise of a future time, when the deep investment and focus you crave will be available, and your so-called efficiency pays off.
Meanwhile, life passes. And what do we do with it?
Alone, one feels the whole universe, and none of one’s personality.
- Sheila Heti, Motherhood
I like this idea I read in a Maggie Nelson essay, that making art is the act of trying to ‘become a stranger to oneself’ (paraphrasing Adam Phillips). It’s moving outside the hard limits of your experience, through the medium of your experience, in order to see things anew.
That’s the first big potential of silencing enough of the world to experience your solitude and limitations in a capacious way.
Firing up a podcast or a video or scrolling a feed are all facsimiles for hanging out with other people, thereby curing your “iddleness” before it even occurs.
It is a lack of contrast that opens up creative possibilities sometimes — alone, your personality has no reason to be spotlighted. Nobody else is there, and so you do become the whole universe for a while. There’s your chance to move beyond yourself, by seeing yourself differently.
This suggests another potential: not only seeing yourself anew, but seeing the world anew.
Can we look at things differently without the distraction of other people?
The act of looking is important. And the act of ‘artistic looking’ (to quote from Mary Gaitskill), means to afford things their due — really give them the respect and consideration they deserve. The potential here is to reconsider what might have otherwise been missed in speed, sound and restlessness.
We inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
- Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing
Being still, being silent, being alone — these may well be necessary for creative ‘newness’. But they also might simply serve as maintenance. Let the brain go fallow for a while, and give it a chance to embed the ideas, embed the knowledge, rather than always having to strive for the next productive piece.
We want to be able to focus, we say we don’t have time or the right environment, but then when the silence finally arrives...
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality… Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough…
Perhaps here lies a more positive interpretation of idleness (I haven’t found a better word yet for that type of ’not doing, but being’); it is an act of generosity, in which you expand beyond the remit of “Necessity” (as Stevenson calls it) and exercise a more balanced, energetic, and curious self. What else might be possible when you stop for a moment and just let yourself be?
You won’t know until you let go and try it.
