Is “doing nothing” a good use of your time?

Doing nothing is a great use of time. Everyone needs time and space to reset and honestly you're very lucky if you have time to do nothing. Having time to do nothing without feeling guilty about it is a goal I strive to achieve. It’s exhausting to think and live as if you have to constantly be accomplishing something. 

Previously one of the best things about winter break was that we have so much time off school and therefore don’t have to do anything or worry about doing anything but now I have a job and while the part about school remains true the overall ability to do nothing does not.  That’s one good thing about school, you have multiple scheduled breaks where you get to do nothing but that’s not true for most jobs although it really should be. Most jobs have some holidays off or employees can have a set amount of vacation time but it’s really not enough. 

There’s a huge labor shortage right now and one of the theories about what caused the shortage is that there’s been a huge cultural shift in the US, and likely elsewhere, where workers have started prioritising their health. I think this is a shift that has been a long time coming. People cannot properly function for long periods of time without sufficient rest and most jobs don’t respect that. There have also been a lot of strikes recently, Kellogg workers have been striking recently and there has been a big movement within the film industry about protecting the people that works behind the scenes. These strikes are also incredibly interesting because there is a lot of power in striking right now due to the national labor shortage so there is a high chance they will be successful.

While the film industry movement started before the incident on the set of Rust ( if you haven’t heard Alec Baldwin accidentally killed Halyna Hutchins and injured the film’s director with a prop gun) it is likely that the movement will gain some more traction after the Rust incident especaily since there were some reports of a strike/walk-out that was planned on the set for the day before the incident. There are countless stories on the IATSE instagram page about film workers with absurdly long working hours and unsafe conditions that lead to a lot of different safety concerns. People need vacation time but people also desperatley need manageable work hours which includes being payed a liveable wage aka not what minimum wage is right now. It doesn’t matter if jobs have a set number of hours if people have to work multiple jobs to survive. 

There is a huge problem in the US where we idealize overworking ourselves. The whole idea of “pulling yourself up by the boot straps” and “The American Dream” are fundamentally erred and yet they are set on a pedastal to be admired. There are a lot of issues with those phrases, and many others, including the fact that they encourage working yourself to the bone for the chance that you could become the next big thing and because they generally just arent true. Sure there’s the occasional person who does manage to build themselves up from nothing but in reality most of the people who are worshipped for their succes started out ahead.

To sum up this very strange personal essay that turned into a rant: 1. everyone needs time to do nothing, without it we will all burn out 2. There was a huge cultural shift during the pandemic that will hopefully lead to some actual changes in workplaces 3. Changes will hopefully also come about from the numerous strikes happening and maybe once one strike succeeds even more will start to pop-up  4.The cultural shift during the pandemic is a good step towards dismantling the toxic american ideal of working yourself into oblivion