It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. It is so: the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but wer are wasteful of it.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in De Brevitate Vitae (“On the shortness of life”), 49 A.D.
It had been one of those days. “I didn’t really do anything today, again.” I had finished the critical tasks of the day and put off all the other things that I really wanted to do. Does this seem familiar to you? What had I done in all the spare time I’d had? “Nothing.” Recently, I noticed that that was a lie. I hadn’t been doing nothing at all. I was doing nothing wrong.
You see, when I was “doing nothing”, I was actually doing something: I had been scrolling through reddit, reading Age of Wonders 4 strategy guides and watching YouTube videos.
Not even the good kind of videos. You know that late night binge, when you’re letting the algorithm take you on a ride, watching the 9000th clip of Joe Rogan talking about psychedelics? “Yes, now that I think about it, what did the Romans think about the christianisation of emperor Constantin? I’ll watch that right after I get to this guy brewing authentic ancient Mesopotamian beer.”
I had allowed myself to become distracted.
And no wonder. Today, we have a whole industry arrayed against us. Media platforms being optimized for user engagement. Literally, psychologists are working on how we can present our media in a way such that you consume more of it. I’m not alleging anyone’s acting maliciously, they have a legitimate business interest in that.
Just understand that the mechanisms through which we engage digitally with media today are being governed by the primacy of user engagement. Not optimized towards actually informing you or even being enjoyable to you, but ruthlessly towards whatever makes money for those in charge of them – which, in current thinking, happens to be engagement.
Here's something for you to ponder: What if the most effective way to keep a user engaged was to make them angry or sad? Or addicted and inattentive?
Engaging with technology does make you less aware. Which is of course being reinforced by design because it makes you more likely to click on that other video. Social media makes you more impulsive and more emotionally dysregulated. It makes you more prone to anxiety, inhibiting parts of your brain that could alleviate it.
So why engage with it? Because it is easy, feels rewarding and because it’s addictive. Again, it’s been designed that way by a legion of very smart people who have nothing better to do.
Realise how unprecedented all of this is. We’ve got laughably easy access to immensely entertaining media: videogames, movies, series, even pornography.1 In fact, it’s hard these days to engage with any media outside of this apparatus that wants to serve more of it to you.
Have you noticed that this makes it genuinely hard to be bored?
What’s your first instinct when you feel boredom? How many times have you reached for your phone while reading this? Or if you’re reading this on a phone, what were you doing on it before? Useful things, things that serve you? Maybe this post, right now, is to you the very distraction it’s cautioning against. What activity of yours have I interrupted? And why’d you let me?
Yet boredom – the kind you encounter when you genuinely do nothing – can be so valuable to us. When you no longer drown out your own body’s emotional responses with external stimuli, more and more whatever’s happening within you will be able to come to your attention. Past the mere desire to be entertained, you’ll find the answer to the question “Yes, but entertained how?” What would you like to do, if you had the motivation?
If you don’t give yourself an easy way out, doing harder and harder tasks will seem more appealing to you. Spelling it out like that sounds stupid because it seems self-evident. It’s precisely the difficult tasks that afterwards seem to us to be the most worth doing. Have you ever sat down proudly after a day of “doing nothing”, just lazing about watching videos, doomscrolling2 or binging watching the new trendy Netflix show and thought: “Yeah this is great! I could not have spent this day any better!” You do that maybe once, but after a couple of days – if you have any sense – you are disgusted.
Here’s a fun question: If you were to go on a complete digital media fast for 5 days, what would you lose?
In any case, next time you don’t feel like doing anything, I invite you to let yourself be properly bored. Do not reach for easily available distractions. Turn off your devices, sit comfortably, think. Or just do nothing.
Nevermind easy access to “hyperpalatable” fast-food.
Notice the words we use to describe these things