I’ve been interested in the idea of anti-work, downshifting, slowing down. The anti-thesis to the concepts of overwork, always-on productivity and hustle culture that the capitalist system is selling us. It started with learning about a concept of “doing nothing” in Buddhism (wu wei). There is the idea of FIRE and early retirements, or even punctuating one’s working life with mini-retirements.

I then read and was inspired by Carl Honore’s Slow. My new reading list was inspired by this TikTok and the first book that I read was Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price. The book reads like a manifesto by a burned out professional who nearly killed themselves with overwork. A very familiar story.

Whereas Price’s manifesto is filled with sobering step-back perspectives and an urgent call to action, Jenny Odell’s Resisting the Attention Economy reads more like a poem, musings on the always-on approach to living that we are being sold.

You can tell Odell is an artist as she uses phrases like “collapsed workaholic,” “period of removal,” and “manifest dismantling.” The story of Fukuoka, a farmer from Japan, who boosted his crop productivity by doing nothing, aka surrendering to the processes of nature, in our times reads like a rebellion rather than common sense.

We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.

— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

True! Too much content, too much posting, too many opinions, this blog including! 🙂 So what’s the solution?

…I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”

On this note, enjoy your weekend, fellow nomads! See where you can downshift, let go, do a bit of nothing 😉