Nothing. Just do nothing.
That’s it!
Now, if you’d like more context, keep reading…
Why You Might Be in Burnout Mode
You’ve got mile high to-do lists, kids to take care of, meals to plan every damn day, and people to please so end up over committing. The result being, you feel like crap, you don’t feel creative, you can’t make a decision, and as much as Arianna Huffington and others jumping on the trendy sleep bandwagon, you can’t figure out how to fit eight hours to sleep in a day. So it’s burnout, day after day.
If you make a million dollars a month, you won’t end up saving money if you spend more than a million a month. Easy math, right?
It’s the same with time. If your to-do list is going to take longer than what you have allotted for work (whether for a job, business, childcare, senior care, etc) then you’re always, always gonna feel burned out.
How the World is Designed to Monetize Your Time
We all know that social media is designed to get you hooked on dopamine like gambling. It’s the attention economy and they want your time because it’s dollar signs to them, but potential burnout for you.
There’s *so much* going on in the world at large and in our individual lives, and the tech bros aren’t going to give us “free” apps without receiving something much more valuable in turn: your time.
If you haven’t spent any time looking it up, here are my Coles Notes.
Did you know that…
- Netflix Shows are Designed as “Second Screens”: In order for streaming services to increase viewership, their goal isn’t to produce the most thought-provoking and creative content. Rather, their main goal is to get viewers to play shows in the background as a ‘second screen,’ knowing that people’s ‘first screen’ is either their phone or laptop. This helps them get more streaming time for advertisers to reach you. Sick, huh?
- Kids Shows are Like Slot Machines: Programs are tested with children in real life situations where their parents are cleaning in the background. If the kid pays more attention to the parents doing mundane housework, then the takeaway is to increase stimulus (more colours! more sounds!).
- Mental Health Crisis Linked to Smart Phone Power Shift: Jonathan Haidt has been making the rounds in interviews nailing the precise moment in history when the control people had over their smart phones flipped. He talks about how when smart phones (namely, the iPhone) was first introduced in 2007, people had a lot of control over them. It wasn’t until the 2010s when apps began to send push notifications and the *ding!* from incoming texts that the power over the device seemed to shift from user to tech companies. This finding came about from trying to figure out why the mental health crisis spiked in the 2010s. Essentially, we’re now ‘controlled’ by our phones.
- The History of Time Management: If you check out Jenny Odell’s book, Saving Time, she goes explains the history of how we became so obsessed with time and optimizing it. It all started in the Industrial Revolution where industrialists wanted to squeeze more out of their workers. At that time, farmers woke up and worked according to the rooster’s call and were reluctant to slave away working (real leisure was a thing back then). The industrialists’ only way to get more labour out of workers was to make sure labour was tied to time, and had workers put in a lot more effort than was normal. And that’s the start of why we’re so obsessed with time management now.
How the World is Designed to Atomize Your Relationships
This might be a little extreme, but you know how one of the key traits of cult leaders is to separate people from their families? Well, our capitalist system is designed to do just that.
If you can entertain this thought for a moment: that the source of happiness is thriving relationships (according to the longest longitudinal study of happiness from Harvard), and a key ingredient of relationships is time (it’s something like 30 to 60 hours to get to know someone and call them a friend), then anything whose goal is to steal your time is creating distance between you and your friends/fam is driving a wedge between you and true happiness.
Less time with friends + more time checking off an impossible list of to-dos = formula for burnout.
1/ Convenience is Killing Your Relationships
Amazon’s next-day delivery, food delivery apps, Airbnb, online shopping, Uber… Super convenient and no need to inconvenience anyone, right? These are great if you are on crutches or live in a rural town without a Sephora. But when we have the option to ask a neighbour to borrow sugar but opt to get it delivered instead, we’re losing the very friction that helps us form bonds. My mom used to say, in order to build relationships, we need to have “coming and going.” As in, you need to one, have the frequency seeing people and two, to some degree bother them and owe them one. That’s why in cultures/relationships/politics were based on gifting. We owed something to the other party that made it necessary to see them another time to repay them. When we’re all about convenience, we don’t choose the human option that allows us to be dependent on one another.
- Hustle Culture = New Rat Race: In the 90s, it was the worst thing to be a sellout, and critiquing corporations was a real thing (aka the No Logo era). Now, we willingly become walking, talking billboards for corporations in exchange for quick cash, whether or not we believe in their products. Nowadays, we’re so focused on making money, it’s easy to take on the badge of honour of being busy and neglect relationships. I’m seeing friends get promoted (which is great!) but our interactions drop off 80%, friends who choose to relocate to make more money, friends who decide on spending extra time on side hustles instead of getting together. Living in a city is expensive, but at what cost to your social + mental well being?
- Non-Human Transactions: We see it in almost every retail location (grocery stores, banks, printing services, restaurants), humans being placed by pick-up lockers, self-checkouts, robot waiters. These loose-tie relationships are fundamental to our well-being as much as deeper relationships, and they’re being parcelled off too.
- Social Media fosters Connection but not Real Relationships: You get to see what your former coworkers ate for brunch, you get to see non-immediate family members’ kids grow up, you get to see inside your fave influencers’ hotel rooms. You have play-by-play views of what’s happening in people’s lives, but that doesn’t translate into reciprocal relationships. As boring as it sounds, reciprocity is at the basis of genuine friendships and relationships – whoever willingly signs up for a one-sided friendship IRL? We get the guise of being in parasocial relationships with people, but they often leave us feeling empty. How many times have you DM’d even a cousin in response to their Ig Stories only to get a wordless heart acknowledgement? I don’t know about you but I don’t love the one-sidedness of digital conversations. When you have so many contacts in your WhatsApp or Signal or whatever, it seems like you have so many people that you can reach out to, but somehow it feels like fewer than when you didn’t have the Internet.
- Commerce-Based Communities: Instead of looking left and right to your neighbours and coworkers, the new “communities” are all commercially-based. At first, this sounded great, “Wow! This brand really cares about me!” but it only takes a second to see that at the end of the day, the only connection you have to the brand or to any of the other loyal followers is a material transaction. I know I’m gonna sound geriatric, but will that brand-based community come to your service when your health is in despair?
- When You Make Decisions Based on How Much Your Time Costs
As Mina Le astutely points out, people compulsively buying Stanley Cups isn’t just a … it’s symptomatic of loneliness and reach for connection
How We Wish We Spent Our Time, When We’re About to Die
No matter where you look, whether it’s the old school book Tuesdays with Morrie, or Insta-famous hospice workers, they all point to one thing about how people wish the spent their time: with other people, in community. And definitely not wishing they crossed more things off their to-do list that’s causing them massive burnout.
At the end of the day, we’re not going to look back on our lives and think, maybe I should have doom scrolled some more, or bought more TikTok trending items. You’re gonna miss the time you wish you had spent with the people you loved.
So I propose that a ‘revolutionary’ thing to do is to do nothing, as in don’t put pressure on yourself to chase money. And in your spare time, really treat it as leisure time to do whatever the hell. Don’t feel bad that you need to keep squeezing every extra second of your off-time to produce something to get ahead in life.
5 Ways to Spend Your Leisure Time
Here are my suggestions. Take them with a grain of salt.
1/ Hang out in third spaces
Don’t wait for friends to make plans, to get back to you about plans, or even for you to start making plans! Just hang out at a cafe or bar and start talking to someone you find interesting. For me, it’s usually an interesting article of clothing or book title.
2/ Unstructured time
Sounds counter-intuitive, but block time off your calendar as “unstructured” or “do nothing” time. If you see your calendar as endless, like scrolling Netflix or online shopping, then you’re bound to get burned out! When a co-worker or manager sees your schedule as ‘open’ and they book a meeting, you probably feel a little dread. So if you block out time in your work calendar, do the same for your personal cal.
3/ Non-scheduled conversations
You’re gonna cringe at this, but try picking up the phone to call someone. The last time I was in crisis mode and called a bunch of friends, family, whoever would pick up and answer – I found that a lot of them ended up calling me back (not texting and asking if I butt-dialed them!). The scary part is, what happens if you call someone when you’re not in crisis mode, like there’s no real goal to chat but to spend time with one another? Yes, super vulnerable. But also it’s a test of who’s willing to spend time with you for no reason other than to connect.
4/ Create memories vs catching up
You’ve got the friends you do things with who usually have a somewhat parallel schedule, and the ones who you’re not so in touch with anymore and every time you see each other it’s just review of what happened in the last 3 to 6 months. I like that catch-up friends are still friends, but those can’t be all my friends. I also wanted to move some friends upwards to the do-something friends. Make an excuse, like trying a new restaurant or checking out an event. If you’ve got kids? Offer to order in bubble tea or make them a cocktail once the kids are down to sleep.
5/ Go Inconvenience Someone
I find that inconvenience is the key to maintaining relationships. Okay, maybe that’s not the right word, but every time you cross paths, you build another touch point. Like when I asked my neighbour to help me hid balloons for my husband’s 40th surprise birthday party, or when she asks us to hide their mail when they’re on vacation. What about someone who doesn’t live on the same block? Ask someone for help, like moving things. Or ask them to come over for dinner (inconveniencing yourself haha). Am I kinda right, that inconvenience helps build relationships?!
References:
- How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell
- Saving Time, by Jenny Odell
- Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton
- The Courage to be Disliked, by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
- “third spaces, stanley cup mania, and the epidemic of loneliness”, by Mina Le
xo, Miranda
