Quitting my job last September was terrifying. It was scary partly because I actually quite liked my job; I liked my boss, my team, my day-to-day work, the purpose of what I was doing, and, of course, a regular paycheck and all the benefits of a good government job.
Because I graduated college in the height of an economic recession and have moved between different countries quite a few times in my life, I am acutely aware of how long it can take to find a job, especially a good job.
What if I run out of money before I get a job again? What if I end up having to go back to work in some boring $20 an hour admin job and then I’m stuck in a place I’ve been before, where I am working full-time and so drained from the immediate work I’m doing that I don’t have energy to apply to other jobs? What if I have a medical emergency and I end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt because I don’t have amazing insurance anymore, and you know, this is America, where we pride ourselves on capitalizing on everything including disease.
Julie really wanted to go on this trip around the world. I was terrified. In my twenties, I wandered the world. I lived out of suitcases. I lived through financial uncertainty, sleepless nights, cheap food, and unstable relationships. But I’m not in my twenties anymore. I’m supposed to be a grown-ass adult now. I am going to be FORTY in two years. I already have occasional spirals over not having some of the markers of adulthood that I sometimes think I should have by now — marriage, children, pets, owning a home (Julie does, I don’t), paying off my student loans, weeding the garden… Now, I’m quitting the one facet of adulthood that it seems I actually do have: my job.
The compromise that came out of joining Julie on the trip was what came after — a plan to spend time working on my creative projects. She has been incredibly supportive about paying for the major bills during the travels and for the three months after. I was going to spend the winter finishing my next book, revamping my first book, applying to acting jobs. If I was going to quit my job, it needed to be connected with pursuing something else that would feel like moving forward. If I ended up broke and desperate to get ANY job, I wanted to at least have successfully completed another manuscript and added some roles to my acting reel.
When we got to LA, I got to work applying for acting jobs and working on my book. And then something else happened. I started napping. I started lingering on my morning walks on the beach (which was, by the way, the nicest place for a regular morning walk I have ever experienced). I started spending more time cooking. I wanted to read at the beach. I wanted to hang out with my cousin. I wanted to meditate. I wanted to play games on my phone. I wanted to do nothing.
Nothing was even more terrifying than not working.
The inner critic came out on full-blast:
What do you think you’re doing laying around and sleeping while everyone you know is working?
How are you playing on your phone when there’s kids being bombed to death in Gaza?
You’re going broke just to spend time sleeping.
You’re wasting time.
I started defending my naps to Julie, who actually didn’t give a shit or even notice that I was taking naps every afternoon. She could have cared less if I was literally sleeping all day. But I felt guilty. I felt like I was failing. I felt like I was wasting time, and wasting money.
And why? Do you know how un-productive it is to sit at your computer and work at 10% productivity when you’re too tired to actually do your best work? Do you know how dysfunctional it is to believe you don’t deserve to sleep when you’re tired? Do you know how bad living in constant “shoulds” is for creativity?
Somewhere deep inside I understood that what I was doing (nothing) was part of the process for me. I hadn’t had a chance to deeply REST in a long time. It was like my body was saying “OK, you want to do all these creative things, but we need to take care of me first.” I had been operating in go-go-go mode for a long time. Hustle, grind, work hard. Time had started to feel like a precious, limited resource. Every hour doing one thing was an hour not doing something else. There was always something to do. There was always more to do.
Because in our society, that’s all you are — what you do. Doing nothing is un-American. It goes against the core tenants that underpin our democracy. Whether you’re a fan of the American Dream or you believe it’s late stage capitalism sucking all it can out of you, we all agree that work defines American society.
It’s not like I don’t know that I am more than what I do. It’s not like that’s a foreign concept to me. I spent several years in my twenties deeply involved in meditation groups. I identified as Buddhist for almost a decade, and I read a lot of philosophy. I also lived in other places, where how much you DO with your time isn’t as emphasized. When I came back to the US after spending most of my twenties away, I remember the shock to my system. This country has a toxic fixation on doing. When I lived in the intentional off-the-grid commune in Oregon, I was reminded that there is another way. When Julie and I were in Costa Rica last fall, I was reminded again that our way isn’t the only way.
But society is like a matrix. You are part of it, and you become it. It’s incredibly difficult to live in the US and not fall into the trap of productivity-grind thinking. It’s in the air we breathe.
Even the self-help gurus that are so prolific on social media, and in podcasts sell you rest and relaxation as a tool to ultimately get back to being productive. Doing nothing, even when it is validated, is validated as another “hack” towards being your best (read: most economically productive) self.
There’s some feminist theory that all of this is deeply toxic in an especially patriarchal way. Women literally need slightly more sleep, and half as much exercise as men. Did you know that? Women also have larger rhythms in energy and mood than men. Hence the recent trends in women talking about managing work schedules for their menstrual cycles, in using our “Monthly Periods as a Productivity Tool.” Some people in spiritual circles — including some voices that I listen to — talk about the “divine feminine” and “divine masculine.” The female energy, according to this ontology, is receiving, manifesting, dreaming, while the masculine is physically working and building.
I don’t know if I like the use of gendering language, but I like the point that our humanity works on different levels and only one part of that is what we physically do, in materialistic terms.
Put another way, we need to go to sleep and dream to function and “do” during the day. Nobody questions this; even the tech-bros who pride themselves on waking up to “crush it” at 5am are interested in getting at least some sleep. Sleep is a crucial physiological process. When we go to sleep, we process and recombine the things we learned during the day. Some studies suggest sleep literally cleanses the brain of toxins. We regenerate in rest. The dreaming mind is different from the waking mind, but without it, we would fall apart. Many cultures and shamanic traditions refer to something like “dreamtime,” a place where some spiritual traditions say all of creation and consciousness arises.
Trees live by reaching their roots down into the soil while also reaching their limbs up to the sky. Their roots cannot exist without their limbs, and their limbs cannot exist without their roots. We are kind of like them in a sense. If we don’t sleep — if we don’t dream, relax, process, reflect — we will struggle to achieve, to make, to work. We must reach up and out towards the sky, but also down and deeper into what nourishes us, the soil beneath us that isn’t visible from up above ground.
Our economy is based on a model of consumption rather than one of relation and community. Old growth forests were long-ago stripped bare for the wood they contained, and so much of our land is now farmed for one objective; the production one thing. Food crops in themselves have been broken down into constituent parts and packaged into supplements that we are sold.
Maximizing what can be taken from the land in the immediate time horizon is more important in this model than the continual health of the land. Agriculture does not care about the roots, it cares about the fruits and the timber. Trees aren’t economically viable if they live for 1,000 years, so why would we invest in their deep, microbial networks and in the communities of mosses and vines that they live with in “wild” forests? Untamed and old trees are, economically speaking, doing nothing. Even environmental conservation must use economic language to validate their right to just be. How much carbon can they store in their trunks? How much will people pay to visit them for a day?
Too many workplaces see their employees as timber rather than trees; as individual units of production rather than functional parts of an eco-system. Humans weren’t meant to perform like computers, with “on” buttons and no real needs besides a power connection and occasional software updates. We can do so much more than computers can, and yet we are forced to compete with them on the menial but complicated logic tasks that they excel at. When computers go to sleep, they are not working, nor are they doing anything. They don’t dream. They don’t create visions of what the world could look like. They don’t snuggle into someone they love at night while they sleep. They don’t go home to make dinner and play with their kids after they’ve bene working all day. Even when they are creatively productive, it’s because they have been trained to algorithmically recombine our dreams, our visions, our art, and sell it back to us like a parrot selling a story about a cracker to a child. The reason that AI is so scary and that mechanization of work in general is so scary is because humans aren’t seen as more than the work that we do, even if that is work that a machine can be trained to do.
All of the nothingness is where our humanity is. Dreams. Love. Spending time together. Cooking for each other. Playing games. Maybe it’s a sacred, divine feminine energy. Maybe it’s where our souls live. Maybe it’s just human nature, striped from its commitments to serve the Gods of our economy. But I suppose that’s a philosophical debate, one we can leave to the likes of Rousseau and David Graeber.
I didn’t even sleep that long before I started finding a deeper motivation. As a processed things in my naps and my long walks at the beach, I started to find more clarity and certainty than I had felt in a long time. I started working on my books with a different kind of focus. I had figured out in my dream-time what it was that I wanted to say, and therefore writing it down was easier. I was more certain of what I wanted, and also my identity as someone who could do it. Some people call it inner work, or shadow work, those times where we go within and reflect, change mental patterns, decide we want to be different. You can’t do that when you’re busy “performing.”
I am so glad that I spent the time I did doing “nothing” this winter.
