Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

Our level of happiness may change transiently in response to life events, but then almost always returns to its baseline level as we habituate to those events and their consequences over time.

We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.

The truth is, productivity is a by-product of a functional system, not a goal in and of itself. The question is not whether you are productive but what you are producing.

Petrini was a well-established food critic, and when McDonald’s opened its doors, he distributed bowls of penne to the crowds of protesters and founded a group called Slow Food. The organization’s manifesto declares, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.

The history professor Nelson Lichtenstein told me, “What you can’t measure, you can’t reward,” and that may be why executives are so focused on work hours. For decades, the corporate world has been consumed with metrics. Managers love tangible measures by which they can determine success or failure. Work hours is one of the easiest ways to measure employee performance, but total hours worked is a meaningless statistic.

I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits.

Stop trying to prove something to others. Reclaim your time and reclaim your humanity.

I know it’s irritating, when you are strapped for cash, to hear someone say that money can’t buy happiness. And yet, above a certain income level, you are quite literally trading your health and happiness for a modest rise in pay (working excessive hours generally results in a pay raise of 6 to 10 percent). Once you reach a sustainable level of income, more money won’t make you happier, but free time will.

In many ways I think we've lost the sight of the purpose of free time. We seem to immediately equate idleness with laziness but those two things are very different. "Leisure" is not a synonym for "inactive" - idleness offers an opportunity for Play, something people rarely indulge in these days.

Creativity cannot be institutionalized.

Idleness in this sense does not mean inactivity, but instead nonproductive activity. “Leisureliness,” says Daniel Dustin of the University of Utah, “refers to a pace of life that is not governed by the clock.

Why are we so efficient and yet so overwhelmed? Why are we so productive with so little to show for it?

For many of us, this drive to leverage every moment eventually gave rise to an obsession with life hacking and a pursuit of ever more complex, arcane, and counterintuitive methods to accomplish what we probably know how to do already. Not only should we fill our off-hours with photo-worthy pursuits, but those pursuits should be awe-inspiring. If we can’t get our friends to “like” our hobbies, then what’s the point?

We've simply become too attached to work," I explained. "We've become too addicted to working and we need to balance our lives with a little idle activity like sitting on porches or chatting with neighbors.""I would HATE that!" she answered with a moo of disgust. "I LOVE to work! I can't stand just sitting around. Work makes me happy."This woman, by the way, is one of the most grounded, cheerful, and talented people I know. She's also not an outlier. I've had this conversation many times over the past few years with both friends and strangers and I often get some version of, "but I love to work!" in response.The question for me wasn't whether people enjoyed their work but whether they needed it. That was the question that drove my research. The question I asked hundreds of people around the country and the essential question of this book:Is work necessary?A lot of people will disagree with my next statement to the point of anger and outrage: Humans don't need to work in order to be happy.At this point, in our historical timeline, that claim is almost subversive. The assumption that work is at the core of what it means to lead a useful life underlies so much of our morality that it may feel I'm questioning our need to breathe or eat or sleep. But as I examined the body of research of what we know is good for all humans, what is necessary for all humans, I noticed a gaping hole where work was supposed to be.This lead me to ask some pointed questions about why most of us feel we can't be fully human unless we're working.Please note that by "work" I don't mean the activities we engage in to secure our survival: finding food, water, or shelter. I mean the labor we do to secure everything else beyond survival or to contribute productively to the broader society - the things we do in exchange for pay.

absent presence,

In 1965, a Senate subcommittee predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would work fourteen-hour weeks and take nearly two months of vacation time. Instead, the average American gets ten days of paid vacation and nearly one in four gets no paid holidays at all. Sadly, two things occurred that prevented a drop in working hours: a rise in consumerism and a steep rise in income inequality.

time.” For centuries, the word efficiency meant “the power to get something done,” from the Latin verb efficere, which

There is a wealth of historical data that suggests we prefer a balance of leisure and toil. But we have been convinced through more than two hundred years of propaganda that inactivity is the same as laziness, and that leisure is a shameful waste of time. If you think I’m using the word propaganda metaphorically, you’re wrong. Let’s dial it back to the 1920s for a moment. The battle over work hours was still being fiercely fought throughout the industrialized world, but the workers were winning. The punishing days of the nineteenth century were far behind us, and workdays were getting shorter and shorter in most industries. There seems to have been a realization among employers that they couldn’t win a direct fight, so they used more subtle tactics learned during World War I. Employers realized they could borrow strategies from the War Department in order to motivate the production line.

The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.

We have been deluded by the forces of economics and religion to believe that the purpose of life is hard work. So every time we feel empty, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled, we work harder and put in more hours.

Many people who are now CEOs and millionaires have worked very hard, no question, but so have millions of people now living below the poverty line. Hard work is admirable, but statistics show it is not a magic potion that will transform your life.

According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, pay for non-management workers increased by less than 12 percent between 1978 and 2016. On the other hand, CEO pay jumped by more than 800 percent if you include stock options.

Everything we think we know about work and efficiency and leisure is relatively recent and very possibly wrong.

We don’t seem to trust our human instincts. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, we search for the right tech, the right tool, and the right system that will solve the issue: bulletproof coffee, punishing exercise, paleo diets, goal-tracking journals, productivity apps.

The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris writes often and eloquently about the ways tech “hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.