Busyness and Idleness - Quareness Series 95th "Lecture".
Somehow in our modern hyperactive era infused with acceleration and excess, simply doing nothing has become equated with boredom, laziness, lack of ambition and waste. We seem to be faced daily with encouragement to be "always on" amid stressing of the great importance of "work", but perhaps this simply betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence? There's a lot of research suggesting that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth (as many philosophical and spiritual systems advocate). Indeed "doing nothing" appears to be quite a necessary incubation for creativity and innovation, providing "duty free" space for cultivating new insights. Essentially the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas.
Indoctrinated by our corporate / mass media / political culture we tend to mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects. But all this busyness credo surely contradicts how most people define "the good life" as well as the many philosophies that extol the power and virtue of stillness. It seems doing nothing / just being may be equally as important as doing something. And maybe we need to take our foot off the pedal in order to balance both?
When our environment accelerates, we have to pedal faster to keep up. The more work demands (e.g. emails) we receive, the more time we need to process them. And this requires accomplishing one or another task quicker (maybe taking less time between say reading and responding), or performing several tasks at once. Such acceleration inevitably demands more work but there are only so many hours in a day and all this additional expenditure of energy reduces an individual's ability to engage in many of life’s other human activities such as family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development. What we have here is a vicious loop where acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and at the same time curtails their ability to manage its effects.
We may wonder why daily life can seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing in an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health. Again maybe it's down to acceleration for its own sake with accelerated technological developments driving the speeded-up pace of change in our social institutions and with "just-in-time" production demanding maximum efficiency and ability in responding to market forces. For better or for worse, the sole goal in mind may be speed? But speed can itself be oppressive and unchecked acceleration comes with inevitable consequences. At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed. At the personal level, it can (and usually does) distort how we experience time and space, deteriorate how we approach our everyday activities and deform how we relate to each other whilst eroding our stable sense of self. Burnout awaits at one end of this continuum and depression at the other. Cognitively such excess speed inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation, and physiologically it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions. And this acceleration eerily seems to mimic the criteria of totalitarian power...exerting pressure on the wills and actions of its subjects whilst being inescapable and all-pervasive, and almost impossible to criticize and strive against.
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11. Unlike as per the Bible, however, our modern societal culture appears to foster a growing tendency toward infantile mediocrity...a sort of society-wide arrested personal development. Despite the reality that some of us can become fixated at a particular stage of development and fail to reach an age-appropriate level of maturity (or indeed regress to a previous stage when facing unmanageable stress or trauma), many an adult's failure to reach cognitive or emotional or social maturity may not be due to individual shortcomings so much as to being socially engineered? Take for example our everyday attitudes and behaviours in how we may treat our senior citizens "encouraging" them into adult care centres where they're forced to surrender their autonomy and privacy, or in the way our school system may tend to treat teenagers in refusing to truly acknowledge their intelligence and need for autonomy as well as restricting their freedom and limiting their real ability to effectively contribute to the workforce.
It looks like this “infantilist ethos” has now crept into a vast range of social spheres. Many of our "open plan/space" workplaces afford little personal privacy when management can increasingly monitor employees, thereby fostering situations in which workers feel that managers expect them “to behave irresponsibly, to take advantage, and to screw up unless they remove all temptation, and prevent them from doing so or trick or force them to do otherwise” (as noted by the American MIT sociologist Gary T. Marx). And our higher education bodies also contribute e.g. through their growing monitoring of students' social media accounts, guiding their every step, or promoting "safe spaces" on campus. Meanwhile our communal environment appears increasingly to grow more excessive, indulgent and irresponsible. Referring to the rise of "therapy culture" the British/Hungarian sociologist Frank Furedi has drawn attention to how adults can be treated as fragile, vulnerable and weak while implying that their troubles rooted in childhood qualify them for a “permanent suspension of moral sense” thereby absolving grown-ups from adult responsibilities and eroding their trust in their own experiences and insights. Another sociologist Jacqueline Barus-Michel (French) has observed that we now tend to communicate in "flashes" (similar to computer language) rather than via thoughtful discourse. And similar trends are apparent in our popular culture...in the shorter sentences of contemporary writing, in the lack of sophistication in political rhetoric and in sensationalist news coverage.
Could it be that our busy interactions with smartphones / social media are so pleasurable precisely because they normalise and gratify childish dispositions? They can seem to endorse self-centeredness and inflated exhibitionism, promoting a present orientation rewarding impulsivity and celebrating constant/instant gratification. Such an infantilist ethos can become especially seductive in times of social crises and fear. And its favouring of the simple, easy and fast seems to have the potential to betray natural affinities for more accommodating political solutions over other (less intelligent) ones. It’s not difficult to imagine an infantile society being attracted to authoritarian rule as a simple, easy and fast alternative to the democratic way of compromise born of critical thinking and consideration of different viewpoints. Unfortunately our modern social institutions and "always on" technological devices (with their tendencies to discourage useful idleness and its accompanying deep thinking) seem to be eroding many of the hallmarks of maturity...empathy, humility, patience, solidarity and commitment to something greater than oneself...all qualities long regarded as vital for both healthy adulthood and for the proper functioning of society.
Daydreaming has had a bad press
But maybe we are designed to daydream
And to dally often in the unfilled hour
Rather than this hustling bustling existence
Demanding industrial homage to power.
Trying to outrun ourselves most of the time
Leaves little room for taking our breath away
Within the subtle stillness of our interior being
Remaking our experience of the living day
And reclaiming some of what was lost in Eden.
Our hearts and intuitive selves already know
The meaning of this life we are here to live
Realising we can find the beauty in belief
After a day's frenzy when we quietly grow
Gracious in thought for what the day has brought.
I suggest there's an urgent need now for us to take the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives and to afford healthy idleness its proper due in the grand scheme of things.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
August, 2018.