On doing less

questioning accomplishment culture

There's a trend I am seeing in friends. We are questioning the societal message that we must achieve achieve achieve.

Do more! Become better! We have played this game for many years. Now we are questioning:

What is the point of all this doing?

(Also, we are tired.)

Is the tree trying to be its best self?

I go to Australia for three weeks. At first I cram in every spare moment with learning animation. Even though I'm here I can still accomplish my goals! Then, slowly, I start to drop it. I become present with the reality, which is lovely: cooking for friends, hiking in lush wilderness, long conversations.

Jesse and I go backpacking. It is just us and a deep ravine for miles. We set up our tent, eat apples, and then there's nothing to do.

At home there's always more you feel you ought to do. There's dishes to clean, messages to respond to, plants to water, and the procrastinating doing all of that.

But out in the wilderness, outside of cell reception, we've done everything there is to do.

So we sit. We watch a water dragon swim and lie in the sun. We watch a bird hop from branch to branch. We watch the clouded sky turn to sun and then clouds again.

I look at the trees. The trees do not seem to be striving to be the best tree. They do not seem to be strategizing on how to get one up on each other, or how to finally realize their ideal self.

As far as I can tell, they are just being.

What is the point of this world?

Maybe the point is to be.

"We still occasionally encounter islands of deep time today—in those moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip 'into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world.'"

—Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Striving for what?

My friends call this embrace of non-doing by different names. Fighting the colonialist mindset. Embracing yin in a world that values yang. Chilling out.

At first I am made anxious by my non-doing, an anxiety I’ll use another Oliver Burkeman quote to explain:

"As long as you're filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you're free of the guilty sense that there's more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence."

What is the point of all this striving, anyway? We are surrounded by more stuff than ever. More content, more noise. We can do anything, it seems, and we want to, but we are busy checking our notifications.

We are told we must keep the economy thriving. We are told the birth rate is plummeting. We are told we must keep it up, keep it up at all costs.

I wonder about this. It seems that the Earth cannot sustain all this manufacturing, all this busyness, all this production. It feels to me that what the Earth needs is more people living simple lives, enjoying nature, enjoying each other’s company, marveling at finding ourselves overthinking apes stuck in time on a rock hurtling through space.

"The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it's the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder." —Oliver Burkeman

Success vs. contentment

I feel the societal pressure to achieve more, earn more, produce more, be more. Yet I envy not those who have climbed the ladders of achievement, but those who have figured out how not to give into the rush of more, more, more. I want to be, not the one with the nice house and shiny car, but the person who truly loves and enjoys their life. I want to be not the thin and beautiful woman, but she who loves and enjoys her body.

Those who are content with themselves, with what they have, with their lives—are these not the truly successful?

Paradoxically, contentment doesn’t come from finally getting what you want, but wanting what you’ve got. But how do you do that?

I think of the time at a Vipassana retreat when I realized that all I needed to be fulfilled was to be present. And in my experience, getting present requires slowing down and doing less. Ironically it is often the striving for a better future that causes us to miss our chance for contentment right here.

Slowing down, I arrive at the present moment and start to notice things: Conversing with friends one evening, I notice I'm holding tension in my body, slightly resisting the conversation. I allow myself to feel the discomfort and breathe into my stomach. Whoosh. Energy floods into my hands and I drop into the present moment. Present, the moment becomes alive. We have a conversation that I enjoy immensely. It is a wonderful evening.

"True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient." — Seneca