For many of us, the long summer break makes us dream of the beach.
Me too. Except, in my dream, I’m digging a hole, trying to beat the rising tide. But for every spadeful of sand I manage to dig out, more keeps filling the hole, no matter how fast I keep digging.
I usually wake up in a panic. And then, because I can’t go back to sleep – my mind swirling with all the things I have to remember and all the things I have to do – I just get up, usually around 4am, and start answering emails. Yet it feels as if, for every one I answer, another two appear.
While my job is interesting, it’s demanding. I often work 50 hours a week, sometimes 70. I’ve accrued so much time in lieu I have to take seven weeks off over summer.
I know how lucky I am to have that much time off. When people ask me how I’m doing, I reply “busy! So busy!”
But more and more I don’t want to be busy. I want to be lazy. And yet, despite being exhausted by busy-ness, I just can’t do nothing, no matter how hard I try.
Most of the time, I feel as if I’m just responding to the alerts that constantly bombard me. I’m constantly running from place to place, swerving from emergency to emergency, trying to juggle work and family as I run out of hours in the day, despite working so many of them.
And always struggling to remember what I need to remember to do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.
So why, on rare days off, can’t I just enjoy a sleep in? Or bed rot, as my children and their generation do? Why do I feel guilty doing things I love, as opposed to things I “should” do?
Especially just doing nothing at all?
Why do we feel the need to schedule every moment, filling every unforgiving minute with a 60 seconds run, so that there’s no time to do nothing?
Even Guardian columnist Adrian Chiles reckons he’s wasted 7,300 hours lazing in bed. But why is it considered a waste – especially compared with hour-long commutes or even longer Zoom meetings where you just sit around while someone drones on?
I’m not the only one. Australians work among the longest hours in the developed world, doing up to two months’ unpaid overtime, creating one of the world’s lowest work-life balances.
And yet like my dream hole, the more we do the less we actually get done. Despite those increased work hours, productivity has steadily slowed over the past 50 years and plummeted since the 1990s.
Let alone the increased stress and diminished physical and mental health that busy-ness inflicts even as we know doing nothing can prevent burnout and refresh our mind, body and spirit, just as sleep does.
Consider all those great religious figures – sages, monks and hermits – who withdrew from the world and seemingly did nothing to find enlightenment.
But like meditation, doing nothing is hard work. It’s difficult to keep the rush of negative thoughts and to-dos instead of just doing nothing.
Yet when I recall the moments I’ve felt totally relaxed, I had no sense of what time it was, or what I was meant to be doing, or what anyone else was doing – much like psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, in which we lose sense of time and our own selves in the moment, giving us a powerful sense of joy and fulfilment.
Maybe the answer is not trying so hard to relax – or anything else. I’ll try my best to do that. Or not.
And this summer, when people ask me what I’m up to, like my kids, I’ll just say “nothing.” And mean it.
• Sunil Badami is a writer, academic and broadcaster
