The Potential of Nothing

I recently read a wonderful book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Given the hiatus I am on, it might seem like I seeked out this book. In reality, the book found me. In one of those serendipitous life moments, my sister-in-law who was visiting us from India earlier this year, randomly purchased the book on an evening walk where she made an unplanned stop at a local bookstore. She planned to read it, but did not start for a few weeks. Intrigued by its title and vibrant cover, I eventually picked it up.

The book gave elegant framing to a lot of my thoughts behind taking the hiatus, but more importantly it broadened my perspective on what the potential of doing nothing is. I highly recommend the book if you have thought about taking time away from the grind, whatever that looks like for you. I have over three pages of quotes and notes from the book that I plan to go back to regularly until they become intuitive. Here, I wanted to expand on one of the ideas that resonated with me, and observations on how I am living it on this hiatus.

The quote from the book is this: “The potential of nothing, is everything”.

It is deep, and with different degrees of reflection, it may mean different things. Deconstructing the concepts in the quote reveals its most general and literal meaning - If there is nothing, it can be filled with anything, hence the potential of this void, is everything.

In the book, this concept is applied to resisting the attention economy. If I take away one hour in the day that I spend on Instagram, the potential of what I could do with that hour is infinite. Companies, particularly social media companies, know this, and hence their entire struggle is to capture that infinite-potential time and attention from me. They are specifically afraid that if I don't spend it with them, I will spend it with another platform, hence taking the ad revenue to that platform. All of us know this at some level, but this framing is powerful in that it puts the power back into our hands for what we do with that time. The fear of the social media companies is also narrow in that I’d like to believe that given the time back, most of us would find a way to spend it ‘offline’, or at least we should aspire to.

I don't use any of the popular social media sites, I haven't had a Facebook account for almost 10 years now. On the wasting-time-online front, there is little I engage with, so it is not my highest priority to try to optimize it further. So, this idea resonated with me on a different plane - it reminded me of the productivity-optimizing treadmill I have been running on for several years.

This idea of being productive all the time was a game changer for me, I give it credit for all my professional success so far. For me, it involved first being hyper aware of what I am spending time on, and then tuning all my time to accomplish pre-set goals. Nothing gave me more joy than checking off items from my to-do lists and feeling satisfied about accomplishing what I had set out to do in the day, week or month. The more I planned and accomplished, the more confidence I gained, and the more my self worth went up in my mind. I became a powerful doer. The flipside is, I had succeeded in making myself a robot on auto-pilot.

Doers are rewarded handsomely in our society: We can show off the meticulously planned, efficiently executed vacation where we saw many sights and had magical experiences all captured by carefully curated photos, we can rise in the professional ladder by taking on more responsibilities - by “scaling-up”, we can be up to date on the latest local Michelin star restaurants and highly rated patisseries, we can pack in yoga, running a 10K for charity and wine tasting with friends all in one weekend. These things make us feel accomplished, make us feel like we are squeezing ‘usefulness’ out of every living moment. Doers are also widely celebrated in popular culture, news, and in our social circles - just look around. So why is this a problem? In my mind, for 2 reasons:

1. Power-doers in today’s world are hard to differentiate from power-consumers. If you read through the activities I describe above, the role of the doer in most of them is to consume, usually an experience made possible by the service industry. Power-doing of this kind, spending so much time as consumers, is not good for us or the environment.

2. We are missing the off-beat. In music, for every beat, there is a gap after the beat. If music was a constant stream of sounds with no pauses in between, it would not be enjoyable, it would be unrecognizable. Most natural processes have an in-between space. Think of the gaps between the leaves on a tree that allow sunlight to stream, or the pause between a single inhale and exhale of our breath (yes it's there!). This space defines, adorns, invites and provides the pause and reprieve needed for the next thing to happen. Without the ability to include the off-beat in our lives, we are unlikely to achieve the full potential of what we are capable of.

The first wakeup call for me on how much of a productivity robot I had become was in the first few weeks of breastfeeding my baby. Physically depleted, running on less than 2 hours of continuous sleep, and feeding for 8-9 hours a day, I was obsessed with measuring the success of my day by what I ‘accomplished’. My expectations were realistic, thanks to all the new mom material I had reviewed before my baby was born - a shower, a meal at the dining table with family instead of on my bed while nursing, a 30 minute episode of some TV show, a phone call with a friend - any one of these in the day was an accomplishment. There really was no time or energy for much else. On some days, I accomplished nothing, and I thought that was a reflection of how poorly I was coping with the new mom lifestyle, how badly depleted my energy was and that there was room to plan my time better. This went on for a couple of weeks, until one day I had an epiphany while wallowing because I had a day of low-accomplishment. My accomplishments for the day were not what I managed to squeeze in in-spite of nursing round the clock - my accomplishment was nursing. Every nursing session that nourished my baby and enabled him to burp and fall asleep was what I was supposed to be doing. That was my whole todo list. And I was crushing it!

This realization relieved tremendous stress for me and enabled me to enjoy nursing in a whole new way, because I was no longer thinking about what I was going to squeeze into the day. This change in thinking allowed me to enjoy the experience when my baby was inefficient and falling asleep while feeding, when he took 20 minutes to burp, when he took 20 minutes to slowly wake up so I could feed him, and I was enjoying it so much that when he was quick to feed and I could actually go take that shower before the next feed, I would stay anyway for an extra few minutes to admire his perfect sleeping face.

This hiatus I am on is one big pause from life as I know it. This infinite-potential time of doing nothing is inviting new thoughts, ideas, emotions and appreciation for things that I was too busy to sense before. It’s allowing me to more deeply understand, synthesize and internalize new things I’m learning about. It’s allowing me to appreciate my loved ones in a deeper way. We know, in theory, that all of this can happen when we take a pause. I am grateful to experience it. On top of this, an unexpected meta change is also taking place. Just like the breastfeeding-epiphany changed how I experienced feeding, this pause is changing how I experience life. Our brains are moldable, we can rewire neurons to create new reward pathways. I sense that my brain is being rewired to no longer feel rewarded by busyness and todo lists. I can take a walk without needing to ‘complete’ the planned trail and feel wonderfully refreshed, I can deal with plans changing without skipping a beat, I can spend an afternoon looking at the swaying palm tree in the backyard and let thoughts flow. I can now enjoy the off-beat.

Apart from diminishing the stress that comes from chasing a todo list and the stress when plans go awry, this ability to live more openly and fully (one might be tempted to say slowly, but that doesn't capture it) also does open up opportunities for consuming less and creating more. A good case in point is all this writing I am able to do by making time for the clarity and arrangement of thoughts that must go into being able to produce a coherent story. I’m going to practice doing nothing wholeheartedly while on this hiatus, to try and reflect on it from time to time, and to maximize the effect of this on my brain so that I can carry this paradigm into the future even if life goes back to needing more todo lists.