#17: The importance of wasting your time

That productivity you care so much about: what's it for? For too many of us, it's not for anything. It's the ultimate end. Unless we're being productive, we feel like we're wasting our time, like we're being lazy, selfish, immoral, a loser. We can only bear to take a break because we think that not taking a break might harm our productivity.

That's not what we tell ourselves, of course. We tell ourselves that being productive is a means to attaining our goals: finishing a thesis, getting a job, getting promoted. Except we're pathological goalpost-movers who never attain our goals. Too often, our goals are just the excuses we need to keep on keeping on. We're wasting our lives with our pointless productivity.

The antidote? Make peace with wasting time. Yeah, I know it's uncomfortable. I know sitting around doing nothing makes you feel more evil than the devil. Embrace it. Get good at it. It's worth it, I promise.

Here are the readings mentioned in this episode:

Camus, A. 1942: 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (a nice person has made it available here).
Headlee, C. 2020: Do Nothing (Piatkus).
Keller, G. and Papasan, J. 2013: The ONE Thing (Bard Press).   
McKeown, G. 2014: Essentialism (Random House).  
McKeown, G. 2021: Effortless (Random House).
Russell, B. 1932: 'In Praise of Idleness', in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (George Allen & Unwin, 1935).