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Should you do nothing?
The Dutch talk about Niksen, the practice of doing nothing. It's their answer to living busy lives fraught with stress and burnout. The idea became popular thanks to Olga Mecking's book.
The practice involves making free time in your schedule to stay idle, do nothing, or do things without purpose. It suggests finding ways to relax by combining moments of relaxation with seemingly passive activities such as knitting, looking out the window, taking a walk, or even allowing your mind to wander or daydream.
Although, there's nothing wrong with doing any of these things (except for daydreaming or mind wandering, but we'll get to that), these activities at best provide temporary relief from the actual problem. It diverts your attention from overwork to doing a handful of activities designed to make you feel good momentarily.
Is finding respite in moments of relaxation after a long day at work really the answer? What good is having these moments in your downtime if you keep working in unsustainable ways? And, if you happen to be one of the few, who lives naturally (joyfully and sustainably), then why "do" Niksen?!
Niksen relegates relaxation to "practicing" a handful of activities. If you have to keep "doing" things to feel good for a brief while, then that approach itself should be questionable. By the way, real relaxation isn't only about what/why you do, but How you do everything in your life. Anything you do requires your attention, be it work, going for a walk, sitting still, watching a movie, or being with a loved one.
It discourages you from doing things on purpose. Paradoxically, there is a purpose behind staying idle, which is to do nothing. At the same time, by doing nothing, it promises to make you more productive, which would imply you're doing nothing in service of being productive.
Niksen creates a false dichotomy between work-related productivity/stress and the time spent relaxing during downtime. It accepts that work-related stress is normal (in that little can be done about it), and the way to deal with it is to spend some time away doing nothing. But, here's the problem. Until we keep creating these false dichotomies, we haven't begun living. This is how we judge our experience of life, which paradoxically keeps us from living. After all, it's not about what/why you do during downtime, but How you do everything in your life.
Niksen encourages activities such as mind wandering or daydreaming. The greatest gift you can give yourself is to value your attention. The last thing you want to do is for your mind to wander or to daydream. Besides, there is nothing natural about getting lost in your thoughts and emotions, which takes you away from the present moment.
Granted, being busy all the time isn't the way forward, nor is staying idle. Both busyness and idleness are examples of extremes. After all, it takes more effort to be at the extremes than it does to be centered, lest we persist.
At best, these are pop-culture ideas (along with the Danish hygge), which make you feel good for a little while, but contribute little to your overall wellbeing in the long term, not least because the real issues lie elsewhere. 🙂
Best,
Rishi Dass
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