The necessary anxiety over doing nothing
Post-pandemic musings about 'just being', in an always-on tech-disabled content-crazy world
5 minute read
Below is an essay I wrote in 2022 and meant to ‘shop around’, but I never got around to it so here it is…
After years of working as a freelance journalist, and months of a dry spell, I found myself applying for a full-time corporate job. Surprise, surprise, I got it. Now what?
I was anxious about entering unfamiliar territory. Should I be giving up on creativity and adventure? Was the timing right? The application process progressed swiftly, sweeping all questions under the rug. I was in flow. And I just went for it.
Over three years later, I had gone through so much: married my long-time partner in bucolic Cape Cod, weathered the pandemic, which hit a year after I started my job, and even bought a home with my new spouse at a time when it saved us a great deal of money. Dumb luck or serendipity?
I shuddered to think of my fate had I not taken this steady well-paying job. Goodbye wonderful intimate destination wedding. And what about lockdown and the ensuing financial pain? Surely, our mortgage application would have failed thanks to my unpredictable self-employed salary. I even weathered a round of job cuts that hit my team at work. Morale was at an all-time low for the survivors of the cull.
As someone who’d been used to working alone, I learned so much from being part of a team, that team. It filled a gap in my personal development. We shared a special almost fated connection — through good times and bad. That camaraderie kept me at the company a good year longer than I would have wanted to have stayed.
Now, with corporate culture draining the life out of me, I actually dreamed of getting let go so I could take my severance package and move on.
Then, as if by magic, that too happened. It was both terrifying and exhilarating being flung into the unknown with no solid job prospects and years of having lost touch with my freelance clients. For the first month or so, I traveled overseas, visiting my parents, and completed a mass blast of job applications. I even managed to put a dent in my ever-unfinished book.
Then, like a fog, an unsettling quiet crept in. I felt a panic that afflicts most humans living in today’s always-on, tech-enabled (or tech-disabled if we’re honest) modern world when faced with silence. I knew I should be doing all those things I’d never had time for when I was knee-deep in the daily grind — dream vocations like acting, writing scripts or poetry. But where I normally relied on a fire in my belly to propel me into action, I was now frozen and rudderless.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, as the job search dragged on, I made a decision to ‘not produce’ unless I was effortlessly compelled to do so. Nowadays, even so-called down time is consumed by producing content - for Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIN, Facebook, TikTok… There’s an expectation for us to all be (often unpaid) photographers, podcasters, writers, etc. regardless of our actual profession.
This mandate is compounded by soul-crushing compulsion if you also happen to produce content for a living. Publish that memoir or sell that film before you die, so you can leave something behind.
I knew I had to first sit with the anxiety of doing nothing — an oddly familiar feeling. On so many occasions, I’d bum-rushed my way through life as an urban-dwelling media professional; so much so that periods of natural stillness felt uneasy. The John Lennon song ‘Watching the Wheels’ sprung to mind. Whether one is a global music legend or a mere mortal writer/journalist, we all need to sit with this discomfort at times, to finally turn acceptance into liberation.
As I adopted daily meditation, yoga and time spent in nature, the desire to ‘do’ was replaced with the ethereally whispered suggestion to ‘just be.’ I started reading a beautiful Vedic text called the Srimad Bhagavatam which sought to teach, among other things, detachment from this world.
When you try desperately to leave your mark, you assume this life is all there is. I know this may be an unpopular belief in today’s atheist-leaning society but I believe everyone, believers and non-believers, can benefit from abandoning the search for eternal life here on earth through the perceived permanence of content creation.
Embracing this philosophy was so easy at times. At others, when challenged, it could be tough. A recruiter asked me what I had been doing in these months since I left my job and I momentarily panicked, feeling pressured to make up some big glamorous freelance project. I ended up compromising, admitting I was spending time with family (and reconnecting with some freelance clients; not a total lie but not the whole truth).
Why had I felt the need to ignore this precious gift of time to ‘do nothing?’ What is wrong with taking a very human break from the mundane world to cultivate your higher self and restore balance to your life? If the pandemic and the ‘Great Resignation’ taught us anything it’s that business as usual isn’t always good for the soul.
It may take each of us being courageous and honest about where we’re at, to inspire a personal growth revolution that has been a long time coming. I know I, for one, will be ready to answer the next person who asks ‘what have you been doing?’ with: ‘Nothing… and fully enjoying it.’
-SC