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Each week, Good Weekend’s how-to column shares expert advice on how to navigate some of modern life’s big – and small – challenges. This week: How to be idle.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines idleness, in part, as “the state of being unoccupied … inactivity, indolence” – as if these are bad things. If I’m overinterpreting here, I’m likely not alone. The Protestant work ethic, supercharged by capitalism, seems so ennobled in Western culture that to admit your life’s ambition is simply to loaf about with books and cups of tea sounds borderline seditious. So I’ll keep that to myself.
Regrettably, says psychologist Dr Tim Sharp, many of us tend to measure our self-worth by productivity to the point that when we do have time to relax, guilt or anxiety can ruin the moment. Sharp concedes that he has, to some extent, “helped propagate this culture of ‘optimisation’ through the self-help movement”.
Now, as “chief happiness officer” at Sydney-based The Happiness Institute, he’s encouraging us to embrace the benefits of putting our feet up: from lowering our cortisol (stress hormone) levels to allowing headspace for the blooming of new ideas. “We need to redefine idleness, or particularly rest, as a positive thing. We see rest as the opposite of productivity, but the reality is that rest makes productivity possible.”
Idleness looks different to different people, but Sharp believes it’s unlikely to be found in our devices. Doom-scrolling, for example, “is more stimulating than we realise”. For his part, Sharp likes to get outside, to bushwalk. Office over-workers may find release in mooching with their children. Primary carers might benefit being away from their kids. Others will find idleness in napping, hobbies or creative pursuits – especially if there’s no particular goal in mind. “One of the most valuable things we can do is find things in our lives that we do just for the hell of it.”
Finding time to lie about in sunny meadows and watch clouds sail across the sky doesn’t mean we have to forgo our goals or quit our jobs, says Sharp. “You just need to redefine the strategies that will get you [the success you envisage] … and realise that beyond a certain point, more and more work is actually destructive, not productive.”
He recommends seeking idleness in small steps, whether that be walking out of the office at 6pm instead of 7pm, limiting computer time after work to half an hour instead of two, or carving out a few hours of “you time” in a given week. “Do this for a week, a month, and take note of the benefits and reassess,” he says. “You might note that you’re sleeping better, that you have more energy, that you’re happier.”
Idleness, suggests Sharp, is not a state from which trouble springs, as Benjamin Franklin once said. Rather, “it’s something we need to get better at.” Challenge accepted.
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